CHAPTER FIVE Incorporation: Citizenship and Military Service

among the most implacable of the Italian allies facing Rome during the Italian War of 91-89 were the Lucani, a federation of Oscan-speaking tribal peoples inhabiting south Italy.

From the early days of Roman expansion the Romans had pursued a course of action that included the absorption of conquered peoples.

Of major importance in making citizenship acceptable to an increasingly large element in each of the conquered Italian peoples was the requirement for Roman military service. The organization and deployment of Italians along­side the Romans were vital in furthering the absorption of a conquered group by making Roman citizenship acceptable to a great number of people. Equally important in making citizenship acceptable was the flexibility of the institu­tion itself. Being Roman entailed both the integration of new citizens as mem­bers of a Roman tribe and property class, giving them full access to the vote and the political process, and the continual reintegration of failed citizens as effective members of the Roman state. Through such mechanisms, the Romans absorbed the new citizens into the social and political structure of Rome, to the point in particular where they embraced public lawmaking assemblies as fully as the Romans themselves.

CITIZEN GRANTS BEFORE THE ITALIAN WAR

The lex Iulia of 90, granting citizenship to allies who remained loyal, was the culmination of a development that began three centuries earlier. From 38I onward, new citizens began to enter the Roman state at a slow but steady rate, admitted by formal grants of citizenship to non-Romans either by Senate decree or by enactment of the Roman people.⁶ Initially, new citizens were admitted as members of groups to whom the franchise was extended wholesale over time. The first such groups were Latins in a few nearby Latin towns to whom citizen­ship was granted early in the fourth century: the town of Tusculum in 381 was the first, receiving initially restricted citizenship and, in 340, full citizen­ship.⁷ The Roman extension of citizenship to Tusculum is regarded as the “pro­totype” for similar grants later.⁸ After Rome's victory over the Latin League in 338, the Latin towns of Lanuvium, Aricia, Nomentum, and Pedum were also given full citizenship.⁹ While these communities continued to exercise local autonomy and observe traditional cults, in these sweeping grants they also became Roman, their territories added to that of Rome.¹⁰

A different group of newcomers in the Roman state was the new class of cit­izen with restricted citizenship created after the same victory in 338. At this time, the Romans maneuvered several Italian towns (beginning with Etruscan Caere) into an innovative relationship with Rome.¹¹ The inhabitants of these municipia, as they came to be called, became citizens in a limited sense. They were obliged to furnish troops and taxes (tributum), like other citizens. They shared, moreover, basic community privileges with the Romans: they could intermarry with Romans (ius conubii); make contracts and wills with Romans (ius commercii); and take up residence in Rome (ius migrationis). Most impor­tant, they shared with other Romans the fundamental civil liberty of provoca­tio ad populum, which protected citizens against physical abuse by elected officials.¹² But they could not vote or hold office in Rome and thus were termed “citizens without the vote” (cives sine suffragio).¹³ Among the first such munic­ipalities in the late fourth century were Campanian and Volscian towns; most of the Sabines were accommodated within the Roman state by this fiction in 290; so too were the Praetutti.¹⁴ In this way, these towns received a different political and administrative cast at the hands of the Romans.

Both community and individual grants of full citizenship, however, contin­ued as the Romans gradually drew more of the peoples of Italy into the Roman state. Some communities previously granted restricted citizenship were fully incorporated several generations later. Some Sabini became full citizens in 268 and others by 241. In 188, the Roman people enacted a law granting full citi­zenship to the Volscian towns of Fundi, Formiae, and Arpinum—home later to Marius and Cicero. These towns had received restricted citizenship soon after the Latin War of 338.¹⁶ Some men entered citizen status on an individ­ual basis, even though their communities had not. By the end of the third cen­tury, first reported during the Second Punic War, the Senate or assembly began to grant citizenship to foreigners by way of reward for special services, usually in wartime.¹⁷ Beginning in the late second century, Latins became citizens reg­ularly as a result of holding office in their community.¹⁸ At the same time cit­izenship was awarded to successful prosecutors in cases of res repetundae involving Roman senators and elected officials; the privilege was accompanied by regis­tration in the tribe of the convicted man.¹⁹ Latins and Italians were sometimes rewarded with allotments in citizen colonies, which carried with them the priv­ilege of citizenship. A slave of a citizen who was manumitted through a certain legal form became a citizen himself.²⁰ Evidently almost anyone could become a Roman through any one of a number of routes.

Although the exact aims underlying such citizen grants are somewhat diffi­cult to uncover, the Romans were clearly selective in bringing outsiders into the Roman citizen body.

There must have been a developing sense of citizenship in Rome between the fourth and the first centuries. At least, accepted wisdom about essential preconditions for receiving citizenship or the aims of giving citizenship to con­quered peoples appear to change at different stages in the extension of Roman citizen boundaries.²² The situation of the settlers in Latin colonies is instruc­tive. After the Latin War of 338, the new Latin colonies, like the original Latin colonies, became allies of the Latin Name (socii Latini nominis).²³ Like other allies these Latins owed military and financial obligations to Rome. To be sure, they also had a unique relationship to the Romans, to which we shall return shortly (in language and culture Latins and Romans were indistinguish- able).²⁴ On occasion Roman officials made a circuit of Latin colonies as they did of Roman market towns and villages in the tribes.²⁵ Generally, however, Latin towns and their territory remained locally autonomous.

In spite of all this, most colonists in Latin colonies, perhaps as many as three- quarters according to Peter Brunt, were Romans who by going out to these colonies lost Roman citizenship.²⁶ Such a loss, viewed by modern scholars as a drop in status, was probably not an issue to the fourth- and third-century Romans who migrated some distance from Rome to settle.

The idea that citizenship might be more flexibly detached from location comes to light in two developments of the late third and early second centuries: the creation of tribal extensions after 241 on confiscated land at some distance from Rome and the establishment of 2,000-3,000-man citizen colonies begin­ning in 184. Citizen colonies were now as large as Latin colonies. More citi­zens now lived at great distances from Rome. Citizen settlers retained the prerogatives and obligations of all Roman citizens. In particular, they were obliged to perform military service, unlike settlers in the earlier 300-man citi­zen colonies. Perhaps to this period, when Romans also went out in numbers to Latin colonies, belongs the right acquired by Latins, when in Rome, to vote in a tribe chosen by lot on the day of the assembly. As a result they were able to exercise in Rome the prerogative of full citizens, namely, voting.²⁸ They could also acquire Roman citizenship by migrating to Rome permanently. The flexibility of the relationship between citizenship and location was acknowl­edged roughly a century later, when elite members of Latin towns gained access to full Roman citizenship through holding office in their communities. This was a development from, and replacement of, the older right to change one's town of residence and so acquire citizenship.²⁹ The Roman understanding of citizenship as a function of location had been irrevocably transformed.

The situation of the Latins in other respects, in particular in relation to the situation of incorporated Italians, also raises questions about the connections, in the Roman mind, between apparent cultural affinities and citizenship. When the Romans began making new citizens in the fourth century, the one group we might expect to lead the rush, the Latins, did not do so, with the exception of a few communities. This is surprising because in other respects the bound­aries between the Roman and Latin communities were by this time blurring more and more, as their joint colonizing ventures might indicate.³⁰ Romans and Latins who migrated from Latium to settle on newly acquired Roman ter­ritory left the nodes of traditional family networks—their families, the graves of their ancestors, and their traditional shrines—to do so. But in migrating, men acquired the essential resource for survival, land. The impact of Roman and Latin settlement throughout Italy on Romans and the Latins of Latium was momentous in other respects.

The shared culture of all Latin-speaking peoples, Romans and others from the plain of Latium, scattered throughout the colonies and municipalities of Italy rested solidly on common religious practices and observance. Thus reli­gion as much as language bound all Latins. Indeed, one of the purposes of the Latin League before its dissolution by Roman victory in 338 was the joint obser­vance of common cult: the row of same-size altars at Lavinium, dating between the sixth and second centuries, is highly suggestive of the egalitarian nature of this cult center to which Latins came regularly from their respective commu­nities to attend to matters of ritual, each man at his own community’s altar. Rome, too, had an altar here. Latins and Romans shared a bewildering swarm of common gods and goddesses, ritual observances, and prohibitions. Among others was Jupiter, the chief god of the Romans, who was the tutelary god also of many other Latin communities. The Roman epithet “Best and Great­est” (Optimus Maximus) refers to the Roman Jupiter’s victory over the pri­mary Latin Jupiter, Jupiter Latiaris, when the Romans defeated the Latin League in 338. Even so, the continued importance of the Latin Festival for one thou­sand years—when sacrifices of milk, sheep, or cheese and figurines (oscilla) were made annually in April to Jupiter Latiaris—is indicative of the central position of a common Latin culture in the Roman world.

Hence Latins and Romans, previously sharing the same language and cul­ture, were even before 338 merging into one group. Latins and Romans both shared a number of community privileges generated by their common cultural and ancestral bases—specifically the right to intermarry, to change residence, and to make contracts, all of which had their origin long before 338. For both Romans and Latins, colonization involved a gradual dissolution of social and political boundaries. At the same time, many colonists in the Latin colonies established by Rome were drawn from the Roman population, blurring the bound­aries between Roman and Latin still further. “Latin” became a rather artificial

group—Sherwin-White speaks of a “later Latinity” after 338.³¹ Yet from the per­spective of shared language and customs, they were still the same people.

Sharing culture and language with the Romans, and ancestral settlements in the plain of Latium, Latins were nonetheless formally excluded from the Roman system. The Romans did not incorporate Latin communities as a rule after the war with the Latin League in 338. With some exceptions, the Latins remained in a special relationship to Rome that fell short of civic merging: they were neither full nor restricted citizens. On the other hand they could become citizens simply by migrating to Rome; and when in Rome temporarily they could vote in the assemblies in a specially selected tribe. Similarly, in the second cen­tury, a later stage of citizenship grants, the Romans often granted full citizen­ship to individuals within Latin communities. Officeholding in particular, as noted, became the regular gateway to full Roman citizenship. The odd relation­ship between Romans and Latins requires explanation, given that other peo­ples whose bonds with the Romans were weaker than those of the Latins were not excluded from citizenship.

From the Roman perspective a complicated set of issues appears to be involved in bringing the Latins in through the back door. Immediately, Romans viewed Latins with suspicion because they were neighbors competing for limited resources—jealousy not infrequently emerges in the Roman tradition as a Roman motive for hostility, for instance toward Capua. The suspicion was justified in the fourth century, for the Latins did instigate war with Rome. Yet at the same time Romans and Latins formed a culturally and linguistically homogeneous group. Given their common culture the extension of citizenship should have been a small step. But the Romans did not take it until almost two hundred years had passed, in 90, when the consul L. lulius Caesar carried a measure in a lawmaking assembly extending citizenship to all Latins. In contrast, some Etr­uscan, Volscian, Sabine, and Campanian communities were more smoothly admitted to Roman citizenship although they did not share comparable ties with the Romans.

The common explanation involves the sophistication of a particular incor­porated community’s political development in the late fourth century. At this time a few Latin towns were fully incorporated. At the same time, Volscians and Campanians, and later other Italians, were incorporated subject to restric­tions as cives sine suffragio. Restricted citizenship is viewed as a necessary stage on the way to becoming full Roman citizens for peoples who did not share Roman understandings of political and social organization. Latins—some Latins—could become full citizens (cives optima iure) immediately, because they shared a common culture with the Romans. But Italians could be admitted “only after a probationary period during which these peoples were brought under the influence of Romano-Latin discipline and culture.”³² Never mind that these communities had begun already to urbanize. The Romans extended restricted citizenship to town dwellers, not scattered tribal groups. Never mind also that most Latins, of both the old and new variety, were excluded. The expla­nation can be deepened. By excluding Latins as a group yet bringing some Latins and Italians into the Roman state in these ways, the Romans achieved com­plementary ends: They strengthened the Roman state by increasing the num­ber of male citizens, and they nullified the potential as well as the actual threat posed earlier by the Latin League and later by neighboring Italians.

Other considerations were also operative. Latin colonies and towns entered into a relationship with Rome that was defined by formal alliances yet still held out the ties and promise of community membership. Latins could become Romans through migration. Similarly, by the later grants of citizenship to indi­vidual Latin political leaders, or to Italians who successfully prosecuted Roman senators under the lex Repetundarum, the Romans created a powerful group of supporters in the heart of Latin and Italian communities.³³ In this way the elite members of Latin colonies and Italian towns, and subsequently their sons and descendants, were absorbed by the Romans as citizens no matter where they lived. Maintaining residence in their hometowns these local elites were also Roman. Firmly attached to elite Roman families by shared ideas about status, privilege, and wealth, some of these families as we shall see in chapter 7 hence­forth not only belonged to the Roman aristocracy but aspired to and in many instances reached the high offices and Senate of Rome. But whatever the inten­tion, such towns, whether Latin towns or new Latin colonies, as well as incor­porated Italian municipalities, became citizen towns of a particular kind. Drawn into Rome's civic orbit to varying degrees through a variety of means, these towns were self-supporting. Nonetheless their inhabitants looked to Rome, whether because of the formal military and tributary obligations or, in the case of the Latins as we have seen, because of the cultural and personal ties binding the separate communities to Rome.

The issue of citizenship, vital in Rome from the fourth century to the first century, was to all appearances a singular matter decided only by the people. At certain moments, an elected officeholder would advance a public law pro­posal to extend citizen privileges and rights to one or another group or individ­ual. The recorded proposals between 350 and 91 are collected in table 5.1. Common to all these occasions is the absence of agreement on how, or whether, to admit a specific group or individual as well as the belief, surfacing at such moments, that decisions about the admission or expulsion of citizens were the prerogative of the Roman people. When Capua, a municipium since the fourth century, fell to Rome during the Second Punic War, the Romans agreed to follow the precedent set in the punishment of Satricum, another rebellious Roman town, in 319. At that time it was the Roman people, convened in a voting assembly, who decided that Satricum should be punished and voted a public law instructing the Roman Senate to determine the penalty. The same, it was agreed in 210, should be done in the case of Capua. The Senate's determination was the most rigorous penalty imaginable, short of total destruc­tion: Capua's governing structures were dismantled and its people reduced in status.³⁴ Again, in 188, the tribune C. Valerius Tappo successfully defended his public law proposal to admit the restricted citizen inhabitants (cives sine suf­fragio) of Formiae, Fundanum, and Arpinum as full citizens (cives optimo iure) when some of his colleagues threatened to veto the proposal, on the grounds that the Senate had not given its sanction. The sponsor insisted that only the people could decide on such matters, and the bill was approved.³⁵ Time and again, too, major innovations in the granting of citizenship were approved by the Roman people in a public assembly. The grant of citizenship to success­ful Italian prosecutors of Roman senators, for instance, including the man­ner of tribal assignment and stipulation of rights, is part and parcel of the complicated arrangements enacted in the lex Repetundarum of 123. To be sure the Roman Senate often recommended that laws be brought to the people, and in the Late Republic Rome's military commanders sometimes pronounced grants of citizenship independently, usually to allied soldiers.³⁶ Nonetheless, the prime instrument in making the incorporation of new citizens possible was the lawmaking assembly.

Correspondingly, the frequent internal opposition to the incorporation of conquered peoples during the Roman drive across Italy was resolved in the public negotiation of lawmaking assemblies. In 126, the question of inclusion in the Roman state was clearly reaching troublesome proportions. In that year, the Roman people accepted the lex Iunia expelling Italians from Roman towns, a bill opposed by C. Gracchus and perhaps intended, Peter Brunt posits, to keep Italians away from an anticipated assembly to consider a proposal by the consul Flaccus to extend citizenship to the Latins.³⁷ In 122, the Latin colony of Fregellae revolted in response to the failure of Flaccus's proposal.³⁸ Yet force was not the only Roman approach to the vexing issue of citizenship in the 120s. Efforts were also made to find a solution by giving allies the Roman cit­izen rights of provocatio—involving protections against physical violence and coercion from officeholders and military commandeers, which had been expanded earlier in the century in lawmaking assemblies for Romans them­selves—to allies (table 5.1). These efforts were unsuccessful at the time, but that the situation was contained is some measure of the acceptance by the inhabitants of Italy of the collective voice of the Roman people expressed in a public lawmaking assembly.

From the Roman side, the award of citizenship reflects a reciprocal solution to the problem of maintaining the Roman community during a period of rapid change, reached over time on a strictly ad hoc basis governed by the framework of customary behavior that the Romans understood: the benign approach to coexisting with neighbors was to make them Roman. When the Acerrani were made cives sine suffragio in 332, following the Latin War, the Roman historian Livy, a contemporary of Strabo, described the grant as “making them Roman”: “Romani facti sunt” is in fact a contemporary expression of this process of absorp­tion and assimilation that had fully entered the vocabulary of accommodation in the first century.³⁹ To be sure, attitudes to Roman citizenship on the part of the non-Roman inhabitants of Italy continually changed between the late fourth and the second centuries.⁴⁰ In the fourth century some were dissatisfied with Rome's citizen arrangements. In 306, the Hernici, offered a choice between incomplete citizen status or continued alliance with Rome, chose to remain allies. They preferred autonomy to restricted membership in the Roman state. Around the same time the Aequi went to war in order to avoid incom­plete citizen status.⁴¹

By the second century, however, hints of such dissatisfaction fade. In 177, the Roman people enacted a bill expelling twelve thousand Latins who had moved to Rome to claim citizenship. In 125, the Latin colony of Fregellae revolted over the Roman refusal to extend citizenship and was utterly destroyed by the Romans, who dismantled even the town's temples. In 95, the consuls carried a law setting up a court to investigate the citizenship claimed by allies resident in Rome; ten thousand men and their families left the city.⁴² In 91, the Italian allies went to war because they were refused membership as full cit­izens in the Roman state. In time, it appears that the developing process that admitted outsiders to the Roman citizen group was fortified by the recognition on the part of outsiders, in particular Latins and Italians, as well as Romans of the mutual advantages of expanding the Roman citizen population by the incor­poration of new citizens.

Indeed, on the part of most Italian peoples, the commitment to the Roman way was so deeply rooted that they eagerly accepted the grant of citizenship to loyal allies in 90, in wholehearted accord with the sovereign will of the Roman people as expressed in a public lawmaking assembly.⁴³ But the case of the Lucani with which we began this chapter raises a question. Given the opposition of the Lucani to Rome, it is not axiomatic that the Romans should have included the Lucani, or others similarly hostile, when they offered full citizen rights to Italians in 90, nor is it axiomatic that the Lucani would ever accept the offer (they did finally accept, in 87). We are entitled to wonder how the Romans could imagine the effective incorporation of outsiders bent on the destruc­tion of Rome and how, in turn, such people could become effective Romans. It is time now to consider some of the Roman mechanisms of integration that made possible the wide acceptance of Roman citizenship on the part of Italians over time, along with the practical acceptance of a Roman way of life and the assumptions, values, rights, and duties that came with citizenship.

ITALIAN ASSIMILATION

Composing his geography late in the first century from secondhand informa­tion, the Greek Strabo was not particularly familiar with Italy or its inhabi­tants. But he knew enough to recognize that the core of the Roman empire was an amalgamation of Italian peoples who were once distinct in regard to lan­guage, organization, and custom. In Strabo's day, the distinctions in the case of the Lucanians, Bruttii, and Samnites of southern Italy had deteriorated in pace with their settlements. But even fifty years before, at the time of the Italian War, we might wonder at the depth of the differences separating some Romans and Italians. Consider the town charter of Lucanian Bantia, written in Oscan and engraved on bronze, a public display of Lucanian autonomy as we noted at the beginning of this chapter. Significantly this same charter reveals the progress of change following the Roman expansion across Italy. Not only were the offices and procedures in the surviving fragments of the charter clearly modeled on the Roman charters of Latin colonies established in the region in earlier cen­turies, but the elite Lucanian draftsmen were by now probably equally conver­sant in Latin and Oscan. Alienated from Rome, these Lucani were nonetheless adapting Roman ways even before the Italian War.

The Sententia Minuciorum, the record of Roman adjudication of a local land dispute in Liguria, in 117, opens a window onto the process of Italian accul­turation.⁴⁴ On the one hand the document, as we saw in the previous chapter, reflects a transitional, traditional world of herding. On the other hand it reveals an extraordinarily deep understanding of Roman ways. The Genuates, whose town was a flourishing regional market, sent legates to the Roman Senate to request intervention and adjudication in a local dispute over the use of lands around Genua. The act reveals a recognition on the part of the Genuates of the traditional Roman way of solving community problems, through the mediation of elite Romans. The Senate's selection of two of its members who were broth­ers, both from the same Minucius family that in an earlier generation had pro­duced a commander who had defeated and arranged satisfactory terms for the Ligurians, reflects the Roman understanding that the personal ties of patron­age governed relations between the Roman aristocracy and local elites in Italy.⁴⁵ From the language and instructions of the final adjudication in 117 it is clear that some prior merger of cultures had eased the acceptance of a Roman out­look by the local elite situated in the city of Genua.

To a large extent, however, this merger was dependent on the urban status of Genua. Genua and towns like it were hubs for change. With the Roman con­quest of Italy, Italian towns and market centers became part of a constellation of communities centering on Rome. Here new relationships and patterns were formed in a changing world. In particular, the local leaders in towns became involved in the apparatus of Roman dominion—administration. Towns served as regional administrative hubs in particular for purposes of the Roman mili­tary draft. Inasmuch as the Romans required their Italian allies and allies of the Latin Name to supply troops in numbers set by the original treaty, local lead­ers counted heads periodically, just like the Romans did at the quinquennial census in Rome. The conscription of Italian troops began with this local reg­istration of young men in the various towns of Italy by local leaders. Further­more, service as praefecti sociorum joined these men in military service with their Roman counterparts, as we shall see later in the chapter, in a setting in which Latin was the language of command. The immediate consequence for elite members of Italian towns and tribal groups was growing familiarity with and use of the Latin language, as well as Roman commercial, legal, administra­tive, and military practices—that is, acculturation. Thereupon we may imag­ine that their participation turned to commitment as they were increasingly drawn into the Roman system. Throughout the peninsula the acculturation of Italians to Roman ways began with local leaders whose primary avenue of accom­modation was town life and urban culture.

The gradual spread of the Latin language among local elites in Italy provides a measure of the stages of absorption of elite Italians into the Roman state. Before the Italian War of 91-89, Latin tended to be a second language to elite members of Italian communities, whose primary languages were Oscan, Umbrian or related dialects, and Etruscan. Latin was moreover a spoken lan­guage: these Italians ordinarily did not write in Latin. Instead they were liter­ate in their primary language.⁴⁶ Surviving inscriptions from the sixth to the first centuries in Etruscan, Oscan, and Umbrian and related dialects attest to the widespread and increasing application of writing, introduced initially by the Greeks, to all languages.⁴⁷ While the main avenues for the dissemination of writing throughout all Italy were three in number in the sixth through fourth centuries—namely, Greek, Etruscan, and Latin—only one avenue, Latin, became so broad thereafter as to accommodate additional tasks. The Latin language, which earlier had merely provided an alphabet for rendering different dialects, by the second century was seen to be the language of power.⁴⁸ In 180, the Oscan- speaking political leaders of Cumae in the ager Campanus petitioned Rome to adopt Latin as the language of official pronouncements.⁴⁹

But language is only one cultural indicator of absorption. Such men also shared a common culture with Romans of their class. Like their Roman counterparts, local Italian elites inhabited a world structured around a hierar­chy of status and wealth. Inevitably the aristocracy of wealth embraced all men of wealth and standing in Italy, who were linked in a network of trade and large landholdings. These are the men who received citizenship first. Significantly, however, the most distinctive, common cultural attributes were Greek in ori­gin. A veneer of Greek culture was adapted increasingly in the second century by Romans and Italians alike.⁵⁰ Most visible in the elite-sponsored town build­ing projects—baths, temples, and basilicae—in developing urban centers across Italy in the second and first centuries, and in the Greek-based education of high-status Romans, Latins, and Italians, this Greek veneer might suggest an external stimulus for the acculturation of Roman and Italian.⁵¹ Indeed, the process of adapting the characteristic ideas, norms, and structures of contem­porary Greek culture, “Hellenization,” was a shared phenomenon among all urban peoples of Italy, now as earlier. But now, the phenomenon was clearly boosted by the Roman military occupation of the eastern Mediterranean and the ramifications of that occupation (because of the influx of gold, slaves, books, etc.) in a Rome-dominated Italy. The expansion of Rome from the fourth cen­tury onward was the catalyst for Hellenization as for other processes.

Notwithstanding a common base of cultural understandings, particularly apparent in their shared religious life and their interaction in such arenas as public lawmaking, elite and nonelite members of society came to inhabit sep­arate worlds in some respects: local leaders in a Rome-bound world of privilege and domination; the majority of the population in a much less secure world, whose traditional ties to land and community were disrupted, for whom life was generally unpredictable because of the new conditions for access to resources imposed by the Romans. We might suspect, then, that the larger society had different experiences of the assimilation process. Language again provides an index of the acceptance by nonelite Italians of superficial attributes of Roman culture. The everyday use of Latin was clearly restricted to elite members of such communities, men who presumably dealt directly with Romans. The prac­tice of staging plays in Etruscan, Oscan, and Umbrian into the first century and beyond demonstrates the persistence of these dialects among most people in the non-Roman towns of Italy. Yet the wide acceptance of Roman ways by ordi­nary people by the late second century is clear.

A telling indicator of assimilation is the extent to which public law propos­als addressing issues raised by Roman expansion involved conquered peoples as well as Romans, as reflected in their efforts to involve themselves in public law assemblies. Although Roman ius civile was by definition centered on Rome and restricted to Romans, public lawmaking sessions soon embraced Roman and non-Roman in a common effort. The importance of lawmaking assemblies as the ultimate mediating authority in Roman society was eventually recog­nized by the non-Roman inhabitants of Italy, as can be seen on the occasions when Italians agitated for or against the passage of laws in Rome. Presumably the initiative came from local elites, some of whom might have had Roman cit­izenship and thus sought to make their influence felt at Rome to the benefit of their standing at Rome and at home. In 177, the Latin communities around Rome sent envoys to the Senate to formally request that a law be passed requir­ing Latins who had migrated to Rome to return to their home communities. The Senate instructed the consul to propose such a bill, which the people enacted as law. In 172, Ligurians petitioned the Romans for relief from wrong­ful enslavement by the Roman commander M. Popillius Laenas. The tribune M. Marcius Sermo carried a bill in a lawmaking assembly instructing the Sen­ate to establish a special court of investigation (quaestio) presided over by the praetor C. Licinius to adjudicate a resolution.⁵² A second proposal by M. Mar­cius ordering M. Popillius Laenas to come before the court was never presented to the people because Popillius appeared anyway.⁵³ A generation later a simi­lar court of inquiry was proposed, in 149, unsuccessfully, to look into the enslave­ment of some Lusitanians from Spain, presumably at the request of Lusitanians. Even outside Italy, conquered peoples had some sense of the role of Roman law­making assemblies—and certain familiarity with the route and circum­stances, perhaps when the Senate's reaction had been negative or noncommittal—that led straight to the Roman people. An uncounted throng of supporters and opponents converged on Rome in 133 for the assembly announced by the tribune Ti. Sempronius Gracchus to consider his land proposal. They included rich men who stood to lose some of their hold­ings on ager publicus, long in their possession even if irregularly held; men of military age, soldiers, and ex-soldiers without land; Roman and Latin colonists and restricted citizen inhabitants of municipia; and Italians interested in the disposition of such land.⁵⁴ Similarly, in 122, in trepidation over the appeal of C. Gracchus's proposed citizenship law, the Senate decreed that Italians must stay at least forty stades away from Rome on the day of the voting assembly. We must wonder at both the size of the noncitizen crowds the Senate anticipated as well as the Senate's fears that these noncitizens could influence the outcome of a voting assembly in which they could not participate.⁵⁵ Clearly, the con­quered peoples embraced also the Roman ways of resolving division in the com­munity through public lawmaking in Rome.⁵⁶ In this context the strident Italian demands for citizenship throughout the second century, which would enable them to participate fully and equally with their Roman compatriots in such events, are more comprehensible.

Italian acculturation at lower levels of society took place along two major and inextricably intertwined avenues: economic changes resulting in the emer­gence of an Italy-wide economy and participation in the Roman military draft. The conquered Latins, Italians, Italiote Greeks, and others were subject to a developing range of conditions imposed by Rome usually worked out in the Roman Senate: the appropriation of a part of their territories by Rome and the formal attachment of some communities to Rome most commonly by treaties of alliance but sometimes by incorporation through the grant of citizenship.⁵⁷ In all instances military obligations as well as specified legal and economic rela­tionships were dictated.⁵⁸ All were required to supply troops according to a for­mula togatorum worked out, it is believed, at the time of the original treaty.⁵⁹ As we have seen, Roman expansion in Italy necessitated considerable adjust­ment on the part of Italians in order to survive and flourish. For some Ital­ians, military service with the conquering army of the Romans became an alternative to traditional ways of movement. At the same time, Italians exchanged their labor for the goods and produce available in Roman and Latin towns. Sometimes they migrated to towns. Such alternatives, widely accepted by con­quered Italians, involved the acceptance of both superficial and deep attributes of the dominant Roman culture. Some of these we saw earlier, including the adoption of the Latin alphabet to local languages, agricultural changes, and the intensification of a market economy accompanied by monetization. The accept­ance of Roman legal categories is manifest in the decision recorded in the Sen­tentia Minuciorum.

The adaptation of the Italians to these Rome-borne changes may be seen as a measure of human determination to survive in a changing world. But what of their acceptance of the deeper attributes of Roman culture to the extent that by the end of the second century we see not only a general desire on the part of all Italians to become Roman but the acceptance of public lawmaking?

Some process was under way among nonelite members of Italy that involved the loosening and remolding of traditional ties with region, community, and leaders. This process, involving the formation of effective relationships between nonelite Italians and the Roman state, was fundamental in allowing the peoples of Italy to accept the new connections offered by Rome, including Roman ways of resolving society wide problems as well as citizenship and the arenas of civic action. The experiences of Roman military service were crucial in the formation of these relationships. Indeed, Roman military serv­ice, which for more than two hundred years joined Romans, Latins, and Ital­ians in a common venture, was the main avenue to absorption for an important segment of the nonelite population.⁶⁰

THE ROLE OF MILITARY SERVICE

IN ITALIAN ASSIMILATION

After 218 most Roman, Latin, and Italian males participated at some point in their lives in the ongoing conquests of the Roman state. Over the period in question, when the Romans conquered the Mediterranean world, Romans, Latins, and Italians were involved in the military to a degree that astonishes the modern observer. Between 200 and 146, when the Romans were first push­ing aggressively into the eastern Mediterranean, the proportion of Roman males serving in the military fluctuated with military needs and ranged from 7 per­cent, the usual peacetime figure, to 50 percent per year of the entire male pop­ulation during times of heavy demand.⁶¹ In times of civic crises between 100 and 44 the demands ranged as high as 60 percent. Given that the base popula­tion for these percentages is virtually the entire male Roman citizen popula­tion of all ages, a figure as high as 60 percent means that the entire male Roman working population in their prime producing years, between the ages of seven­teen and forty-five, was serving in the military.

Other Italians were drawn into military service as well. The size of the mili­tary manpower pool Rome created in this way was staggering. In 225, more than one hundred years after Rome's conquest of Italy began, the Romans directed all eligible males ages seventeen to sixty to stand by for a call to arms when faced with a serious threat in north Italy from the Gauls.⁶² The Greek historian Poly­bius reports that 273,000 Roman males were listed as eligible for military ser­vice during the ensuing crisis.⁶³ At the same time, eligible males in the same age range among the Latins, Rome's closest allies, numbered 111,000. The Samnites followed in Polybius's list with 103,000; then the Apulians with 75,000; the Abruzzi peoples with 45,000; the Etruscans with 72,000; the Umbrians with 29,000; and the Lucanians with 44,ooo.⁶⁴ Poised to conquer the Mediterranean, the Romans presented a formidable assemblage drawn from all the peoples of Italy as a result of the system of alliances instituted by the Romans and pur­suant on conquest.

After 200, the Roman demands for manpower and Roman success overseas involved the male population in a cycle of military mobility in vast numbers. We have figures on the combined participation of Romans, Latins, and Italians in Roman military service. Out of an estimated 850,000 men in Italy between the ages of seventeen and forty-five on average in the first fifty years of the second century, the numbers called up each year ranged from a high of 182,000 (21 percent of total) to a low of 5,500 (2 percent of total). Rarely do we see a year where less than 10 percent of the entire male population of Italy—Romans, Latins, and Italians—is engaged in military service, for increasingly long peri­ods of service.⁶⁵ Clearly, a significant proportion of Roman and Italian males in their prime producing years was continuously siphoned off to serve in the army.

That the military experience directly shaped the lives of these men over time is beyond doubt. The extent to which the Roman army was engaged in road and engineering works across Italy and elsewhere, building infrastructures essential for Roman expansion and prosperity, suggests the difficulty of sepa­rating military service from a wider Roman experience. This is also apparent in the more prosaic, administrative aspects of army life experienced by the fighting man. All Roman males ages seventeen to sixty were liable for mili­tary service, their names and eligibility entered on a military list based on the quinquennial enumeration of citizens. In practice only males ages seventeen to forty-five (iuniores) were called up. Older men ages forty-six to sixty (seniores) were excused from actual service, along with priests, except in times of mili­tary emergency, and at age sixty a citizen's military obligation as well as other civic obligations ceased altogether.66 But the younger men were obliged to fight in sixteen campaigns by the time of the Second Punic War, and by the end of the second century soldiers spent on average six years away from home, by modern estimates.67 The number of males involved in the military every year, especially between 218 and 44, was considerable: For over two hundred years Roman military needs drew heavily and constantly on the population of Roman males ages seventeen to forty-five. The draw on fighting men among Rome's Latin and Italian allies was likewise heavy, for these groups provided at times roughly half the troops in Rome's armies. For all males in Italy, mili­tary service was a constant fact of life.

For everyone concerned, military demands meshed so closely with commu­nity routines that some facets of military service were customarily matters of personal rather than state obligation. In Rome the stages of military prepara­tion from conscription to muster rested to a large extent on ordinary Romans. The regular levy for the four new consular legions formed every year occurred on the Capitoline hill in Rome in March, until the second century, when Jan­uary became the first month of the year. In this location Roman males eli­gible for military service assembled in their tribes to be selected, four at a time from each tribe, and assigned one at a time to one of the four legions by the military tribunes.⁶⁸ Outside this regular event in Rome, which required males to travel to Rome, military tribunes traveled out from Rome or back to Italy from military encampment to Roman towns and other Roman settlements in Italy to conscript more legionaries as needed, again from the eligible males.⁶⁹ Whether in Rome or in Roman territory the recruitment of the new legionar­ies was sealed simply by the military oath (sacramentum) binding them to their commanders—and underscoring the personal dimension of leadership in the military sphere from an early date. Once signed on in this fashion, the soldiers were sent away with orders to report at a specified future date to a muster point where the legion would form up for deployment in Italy or abroad. Until the second century recruits for the most part also equipped themselves initially, pro­viding their own weapons, armor, and clothing.⁷⁰ Throughout the campaign, the legionaries paid for their own rations. Only at the end of the campaign did they receive their compensatory stipend. Thus individuals were responsible for presenting themselves for conscription and getting themselves to the legion in a state of armed readiness.

Yet eventually transcending the customary role of individual obligation was a level of state-managed organization that far exceeded levels attained in any other ancient military force.⁷¹ This organization, resting in some of its aspects on an expanded use of writing, is visible in all facets of military activ­ity, from conscription to deployment and supply. Conscription itself depended on a list of eligible males, noting ages and property qualifications, that was com­piled every five years from an enumeration of citizens. In 225, the list held the names of 273,000 Romans, a rather large number of bodies to keep track of in a largely oral society. Moreover the numbers changed regularly as the output of citizens' land fell below or climbed above the minimum property qualifications and as new citizens entered or left the pool. Traditionally a large area was des­ignated on the edge of the Campus Martius in the late fifth century, the Villa Publica, for the purpose both of taking the census and reviewing the citizens, as well as holding military levies. The area continued to hold these combined functions in the last century. Surrounded in due course by a colonnaded por­tico the Villa Publica was thus largely an open space for assembly, conscription, and enumeration, the nearby Temple of the Nymphs serving as an archives to house the growing body of records generated by the need to enumerate the male population.⁷²

The Roman military generated other records. Probably before the third cen­tury, the Romans had developed a sophisticated and rigorous system of record keeping to identify the current status of their legionary manpower in the field.⁷³ On the level of the basic unit of organization in each legion, the century, hold­ing one hundred men, the unit commander, a centurion, kept a daily log on each trooper. Daily the centurions noted the presence or absence as well as the conduct of individual troopers, and daily they submitted these unit logs to the military tribunes commanding the maniples, and later cohorts, into which the centuries were grouped. In turn, the ranking tribune submitted the record of soldiers present and absent for the entire legion to the commander so that from day to day he knew exactly how many soldiers were on hand.⁷⁴ Not for a thousand years did European armies begin to employ a similar level of per­sonal accounting.

Supply, too, required a high level of administrative organization. Supply was of primary concern to commanders, whose first task at the beginning of a cam­paign was to contract for the grain, oil, wine, and other staples needed to main­tain the legions and the allied contingents in the field. Once the legions began to fight regularly outside Italy in Europe, North Africa, and western Asia after the First Punic War, sources of supply and supply routes became rather complicated and difficult. Yet commanders continued to contract for supplies in Rome, with state or private suppliers, the latter Roman or Italian. We can see how the necessity of moving grain to a Roman army in Syria or Illyria required these private suppliers to seek markets in foreign lands, building ever expanding networks of trade that centered on Rome. Similarly, shipping the grain acquired as tribute from the grain-growing provinces of Sardinia and Sicily to such an army required a large-scale and dependable transport system. Commanders saw also to the equipment of their troops, apt to wear out or disappear in the course of any campaign. In wartime, the output of enemy arms factories could be diverted to Roman use, or allies called on to supply Roman soldiers, or the soldiers set to producing their own gear. In the first century these supplies were also produced by private contractors.⁷⁵ So important was mili­tary supply in all its aspects that the Romans developed, in ad hoc stages over time, a fairly sophisticated administrative apparatus and staff, managed by a quaestor, to carry it.⁷⁶ Of the five centuries of noncombatant specialists on the military lists, one, composed of attendants (accensi velati), is thought to have housed the low-level administrative personnel required by military supply.⁷⁷

Associated with these developments is an expanded use of writing. Writing, adapted by Latin speakers over the seventh and sixth centuries to restricted uses, now made possible the collection and transport not only of vast quanti­ties of grain but of the Roman legions themselves. As Roman conquests pro­ceeded, careful and accurate methods of record keeping emerged, making extensive use of writing, simply to keep track of the military pool and to main­tain an efficient force especially as the length of military service increased and with it the number of men fighting. The use of writing as a fundamental tool of administration first reached a significant scale in the service of Roman military manpower.⁷⁸ Writing was fundamental to Roman military organiza­tion. In turn, Roman military organization was a prime factor in the unifica­tion of Italy.

Inasmuch as the military experience of Italians resembled that of Romans, the demands of military service imposed a common administrative structure on these outside peoples. For the Latin and Italian allies, meeting the demands of Roman military service entailed an accommodation to Roman standards of organization, beginning with their conscription and deployment. Every allied community was required to contribute infantry and cavalry on request, whose numbers were fixed by the original treaty with Rome.⁷⁹ Furthermore, each com­munity kept a list of men ages seventeen to forty-five eligible for military ser­vice, like the Roman list, and based also on enumerations of the male population.⁸⁰ Until 204, the lists were made locally in Latin and Italian com­munities. But after 204, the census in the twelve Latin colonies came under the jurisdiction of Roman censors, and the census of the Italian allies may have done so, too, during the course of the next century, although this is uncertain.⁸¹ Roman organization was taking over.

The conditions of military service brought Italians in close proximity to the Roman system. The contingents of allied troops and cavalry conscripted from each community were attached to the legions as supporting units called alae sociorum. Initially, these allied contingents were under the general leadership of the consul commanding the Roman legion to which each was attached, but more immediately were under a joint Roman and Italian command consisting of three Italian subordinate commanders from the same community as the sol­diers and three junior Roman military commanders, praefecti sociorum, who were equivalent in rank and function to the military tribunes commanding the cohorts in the legions.⁸² Later, like the legions, the allied contingents were composed of cohorts, led by Italian commanders, praefecti cohortum.⁸³ The lan­guage of command was Latin; the clothing, armor, and weapons of the heavy­armed and light-armed troops were the same in the legions and the allied contingents. While the legionaries received a stipend from which they paid for rations, the allies received a monthly grain allowance of four modii of wheat. Training was the same. At the end of a day's march everyone constructed the typical Roman fortification, designed not only for maximum security and rapid deployment of the cohorts but for accountability: every man and every cohort were in their proper places in a Roman camp, ranged neatly in a regu­lar hierarchy of cohorts around the commander's quarters and the camp shrine, where the standards reposed, ritual center of the encampment.⁸⁴ The rigorous discipline of Roman military life, the demanding obedience to authority represented in centurions, military tribunes, and commanders, broke down the cultural norms of non-Roman troops and fostered Roman values in their place. Fighting for Rome almost continually in the period from 264 (First Punic War) to 91 (Italian War), Italians eventually came to share much in common with their Roman comrades.

Inevitably the long involvement with the Roman army shaped the assimi­lation experience of many ordinary members of Italian society. As a result of campaigning with the Romans, Italian allies firmly embraced the Roman sense of organization, regularization, and order. These deep attributes of Roman cul­ture, embodied in the Roman military, held out the promise of security in some­what precarious lives, as did supply and labor markets in towns. Taken on by non-Romans, these attributes were reinforced by the tangible rewards of mili­tary service, land, and cash. Italians and Latins as well as Romans received allot­ments of land either in colonies or as individual grants. Usually they were resettled in the same units in which they had served. Regularly they received gifts of cash, donatives, from the booty acquired on successful campaigns. These donatives could be quite substantial at times, given the unsophisticated mon­etary economy of Roman Italy. Such an infusion of cash in the lower levels of society must have contributed greatly to social change in Italy, reinforcing the market economy set in place by Roman expansion and altering conditions of landholding and acquisition by enabling these men to purchase land.⁸⁵ Con­currently, military service opened up access to the resources of Rome for many allies and their families as they adapted to Roman ways.

More important, the land grants and colonies preserving the integrity of units that had campaigned together provide an index of the deeper social cohe­sion fostered at the lower levels of society among all the peoples of Italy by military service. Italians and Latins eventually merged with their Roman com­rades. Especially after 200, soldiers show a remarkable unity of interest and loyalty to a Roman system in which men have access to the resources of a con­quering state. After the Italian War this unity deepens, notwithstanding social and economic upheaval in Italy as well as increasing conflict within the ranks of Rome's leaders. Even during the Roman civil wars of the first century, both in the period from 87 to 80 and in the period from 50 to 44, soldiers in oppos­ing legions show a great reluctance to fight one another. Instead at the first opportunity they combine forces. Military service had become the chief uni­fier of Italy by the time of the Italian War.

Such was the assimilation of allies through military service that by the second century the fighting men of Italy formed a large group among the major­ity population keenly disposed to full inclusion in the conquering Roman state. As a citizen of Rome a soldier was privileged. Roman soldiers received more land and more cash. Outside the military camp, citizens could avail themselves of grain at a fixed price beginning in 123; later grain was free.⁸⁶ Roman soldiers had legally defined civil liberties or, more loosely, civil rights—a phrase that conveys the meaning (though not the limited scope, by U.S. expectations) of provocatio to the Romans—and enjoyed more legal protection than Italians.⁸⁷ In particular, they were protected from physical punishment (flogging) by a lex Porcia carried in the second century. At times, some Romans sought to ame­liorate conditions of military service for the Latin and Italian allies, too, in a variety of ways: by limiting terms of service and ages of conscription or by shar­ing Roman civil liberties with them. The public law proposals presented on the latter issue in the late second century failed. Of greater concern to the allies were the public law proposals offering citizenship itself. As soldiers fighting alongside the Romans, the allies were well aware that Roman citizenship itself opened up greater access to resources. But the primary way to express power as a citizen was voting, and to do this as well as to exercise all the prerogatives of Roman citizenship, a man had to be duly declared and registered in Rome as a member of a tribe and property class.

TRIBES AND PROPERTY CLASSES

On at least two occasions, under uncertain circumstances and through unreported mechanisms, the Romans lowered the minimum property qualifications for reg­istration in the bottommost infantry rating, Class 5. The reductions—implied by the differences in the minimum property qualifications reported by Fabius Pictor for early Rome, by Cicero for sometime probably before 129, and by Polybius for some intervening date—are reliably linked to military manpower needs.⁸⁸ In all likelihood the admission of citizens with no infantry rating (proletarii) into the class of landholders (assidui)—the practical outcome of lowering the minimum qualification—was accomplished by the determination of a consul or proconsul to conscript men with a rating of 4,000 asses instead of 11,000 asses (or 1,100 denarii) in 214 and of some later commander sometime before 129 to conscript men with only 375 sesterces (equivalent to 1,500 uncial asses).⁸⁹ Whatever the mechanism, these reductions are testimony to a widening gap between effec­tive and ineffective citizens in Rome. The predicament, an outgrowth of Roman expansion, would seem to bode ill for the future. Nonetheless the state flourished, its legions replenished from the ready and numerous proletarii, many of them new citizens, by the simple act of lowering the property qualifications. That the step was taken without visible recourse to a lawmaking assembly suggests it was uncontroversial. Certainly the state's defensive needs (not to mention the inter­ests of public harmony) provide compelling reason to boost a large class of mili­tary-ready men to a viable level of citizen performance. But like the continual admission of new citizens, which often was controversial, these reductions bear witness to the bedrock of Roman success: the purposeful adjustment of the state's most important resource, the Roman people, to permit the continued growth of Rome.

Making such adjustment possible was the flexibility of two structures that form our subject in this section, the Roman tribes and property classes. Every Roman belonged to one of thirty-five voting districts, or tribes (tribus), and one of several status and economic brackets, or property classes (classes), formal and legally conceived groups of closely regulated membership. Together the tribes and the property classes, the latter variously divided for political action into 193 small units called centuries, formed the bases of civic participation in Rome. To a large degree they were overlapping bases, although the tribes, whose cor­porate identity and structure were critical to the effective operation of the state, formed the more important unit of Roman citizen organization.⁹⁰ The mesh of tribes and centuries in the first century was ceremoniously displayed on the occasion of the quinquennial enumeration and review of citizens. Assembled in their thirty-five tribes, systematically arranged in accordance with custom and geographic location, the Roman people stood before the censors in ranked order by property classes and centuries.⁹¹ More important was the discreet mesh of tribes and centuries in the reformed centuriate assembly, to which we shall return shortly. Here let us begin with the tribes.

The Roman tribes, an institution believed to be unique in Italy to the Romans, were in origin territorial districts into which Roman state land owned by Roman citizens was ordered.⁹² In the fifth century, the hinterland of the city of Rome, an area measuring roughly four thousand square kilometers, was divided into seventeen rural tribes, and the city itself was divided into four urban tribes.⁹³ Between the fourth and second centuries, however, the geographic relationship of the tribes and tribesmen to Rome changed when the state appropriated more and more Italian land and assigned it to citizens, scattering Roman-owned prop­erties at some distance from the city. In the subsequent adjustment of the Roman tribes to fit the new lands, the Romans played around with the original tribal organ­ization of Roman territory, creating fourteen new tribes on recently confiscated territory that abutted onto the original tribes. Four tribes were created in 387 on land taken from Veii (Livy 6.5.8). Insofar as we can determine, more were created in pairs of two in 357 (Livy 7.5.12), 332 as noted later (Livy 8.17.11), 318 (Livy 8.20.21), 299 (Livy 10.1.3), and 241, with the result that Roman tribes now extended from south of Capua and the Volturnus River to lacus Ciminius in the north and west to Reate on the via Salaria. Jumping the central Apennine ridges, another tribe was located farther west still, along the Adriatic coast. After 241 the Romans created no more new tribes on confiscated land but allocated Roman- owned land among existing tribes in what can be called “tribal extensions.” This was done first in 232, in connection with the viritane allotments granted to citi­zens by the lex Flaminia, on territory taken from the Senones in north Italy. The mechanisms for creating the new tribes and extensions are obscure, perhaps because the necessity was recognized throughout the Roman community without ques­tion. The censors, responsible for tribal registration, are the most likely agents of the new additions.⁹⁴ In fact, Livy, commenting on the census of 332, notes that the censors at this time added two new tribes for recently conquered lands.⁹⁵

In any event, the process of tribal expansion entailed gradual and clearly deliberate adjustments. Initially the Romans created new tribes around Rome. Then they stretched the boundaries of both old and new tribes. Finally, when the extension of tribal boundaries into adjoining areas around Rome was no longer possible, because Roman state land abutted onto the territory of a Latin town or an allied Italian people, the Romans created tribal extensions at some distance from the original tribe.⁹⁶ Such extensions were regularly adjacent to or near the territory of Latin colonies; Latin colonies, in turn, which might have walled urban centers (oppida), were often situated near new tribes in order to offer protection against hostile encroachments.⁹⁷ Through this process, ter­ritories seized from defeated Italians, on which private Roman landholdings were established, were fitted to the existing structure of Roman tribes. In the development of a new relationship between the conquered lands and Rome, the Roman flair for defining new circumstances within a framework of custom­ary behavior shows itself again.

As the tribe in origin was a territorial district, so each citizen in principle belonged to the tribe dictated by his landholdings and thus his place of residence.⁹⁸ If he owned land in the city of Rome itself, resided permanently in the city and owned no land, or stood on the margins of Roman society, he belonged to one of the four urban tribes whose membership was for the most part restricted to urban inhabitants and select groups such as former slaves.⁹⁹ A random and unchang­ing selection of Romans in the various tribes by no means follows from this prin­ciple, however. From the beginning of the Republic there were great disparities among tribesmen with respect to wealth and status. In the rural tribes, filled with men who owned land in that tribe, a few tribesmen were equites while most, the men called assidui, were enrolled in Classes 1 through 5. The rural tribes also held Romans whose valuation fell below the minimum property qualifications for the infantry classes. These were proletarii, the men “below the classes” (infra classem).¹⁰⁰ The ownership of land, not the assessed value of the land, determined member­ship in a rural tribe.

Over time, the varying life circumstances confronted by individual Romans altered other traditional patterns of tribal membership. In the first place, tribes­men on new tribes and tribal extensions included citizens previously registered in another tribe who were now recipients of land allotments as colonists, or on a man-by-man basis (viritim). Among them also were Romans from leading clans, whose willing transfer to new tribes secured the hierarchic principle of the voting districts.¹⁰¹ Significantly, the dispersal of citizens across Italy in pri­vate landholdings and the creation of additional tribes were managed in such a way as to maintain a balance in Rome's voting assemblies—including public lawmaking assemblies. More critical, a rather high level of personal mobility brought about by land settlement and military service produced a situation by the late second century where residency in a rural or urban tribe, that is, a spe­cific geographic location, was not accompanied by membership in that tribe. For, despite individual migration, a Roman's tribe remained the same. Neither the censors nor the Roman people ever transferred citizens from one tribe to another, with the exception of settlers on new tribes, including noble Romans reassigned to new rural tribes, or former slaves. (The review of these rural immi­grants' property ratings is another matter, however.) Hence, citizens in rural tribes who migrated permanently to Rome were not placed in urban tribes. Per­manent city residents, such Romans nonetheless remained in their rural tribes. They were not reassigned to urban tribes.¹⁰² Nor, after the lex Iulia of 90, were new citizens from the municipia of Italy who migrated to Rome registered in Rome's urban tribes. Their tribe was the tribe of their townsmen. Increasingly tribal affiliation was simply inherited, having little to do with place of residence or ownership. By the first century, the principle of tribe as territorial district had effectively collapsed. All the same, it would be revitalized following the Italian War, at least for a while, owing to certain developments, to which we shall return.

The changing character of the Roman tribes notwithstanding, the primary attachment of every citizen to the Roman state was his tribe. Born into the tribe of his father and registered on the tribal rolls at birth or age one year, a citizen could expect to spend his life in the tribe.¹⁰³ From the age of citizen responsibil­ity onward, seventeen years, he performed every civic activity—from voting to military service, from the payment of a land tax (discontinued in 167) to state rit­ual observance—as a tribe member. His political voice found its purest expression in the group vote of Rome's tribal assemblies. His welfare rested first and foremost on the human network within the tribe, which provided housing for the immedi­ate relationships linking family members, friends, and neighbors, people and lead­ers. His tribe, and the tribe of each Roman, was his principal community.

While the basis of civic participation was registration in a Roman tribe, the degree of participation was determined by economic or property rating. Informa­tion pertinent to the property classes, in the period between roughly the Second Punic War and ca. 140, when the sesterce replaced the as as the “normal offi­cial unit of reckoning of the Roman state,” is presented in table 5.2.¹⁰⁴ Until the late second century, the assignment to a particular property class reflected a cit­izen's ability to arm himself for war, placing him in the cavalry (equites), infantry (Classes 1 through 5), or support units (infra classem), as appropriate. Every year when four new legions were formed for the two new consuls, the infantry was drawn from citizens in five numbered property ratings, called classes (sing. clas­sis), and the cavalry and support units from two unranked ratings, shown in table 5.2, column 1. Men who served as legionaries, the heavily armed soldiers form­ing the main strength of Rome's army, had property qualifications that placed them in Classes 1 through 3. Men in Classes 4 and 5 were lightly armed skirmish­ers. Beneath these five infantry ratings was an unranked class for Romans with insufficient means to qualify for assignment in a ranked property class and thus described in Latin as citizens infra classem. The support units were drawn from this class. Ranked above the five infantry classes, in addition, stood a single rat­ing for citizens who could (in origin) maintain a horse. Citizens in this group were cavalrymen (equites), more commonly called equestrians. Included in their num­ber were the leading families of the state whose members supplied Rome's polit­ical leadership throughout the Republic. Testimony to the defense priorities of a small-scale community, the property classes of early Rome assumed an econom­ically, socially, and numerically stable male population. Over time, however, the classes encompassed a population whose shifting configuration was unimagined by the originators of the Servian Reform.

In pace with the social and economic transformation attendant on Roman expansion in our period of interest, the customary census of Roman citizens envisaged by the property ratings changed. In particular, the number of Romans registered in the highest and lowest classes multiplied, as new-sprung extremes of wealth and penury appeared in Roman society. Most visibly affected was the membership of the equestrian class, the highest social and political status group, whose membership soon formed the most important pool from which new polit­ical leaders emerged.¹⁰⁵ There were few equites at the time of the Servian reform, early in the fourth century, when an equestrian rating determined responsi­bility for cavalry service. (The early Roman military organization probably needed about 1,600 equites annually.¹⁰⁶) At that time, according to Roman tradition, a formal body known as the “equestrians with a public horse” (equi­tes equo publico), numbering 1,800, came into existence, whose members were registered in the first eighteen centuries of the centuriate assembly and period­ically reviewed by the censors as to their qualifications.¹⁰⁷ Under the year 225, the Greek historian Polybius records that 23,000 Romans qualified as equites, out of an able-bodied male population of 250,000. The larger-than-might-be- expected figure, nearly 10 percent of the male population, is doubtless owed to a combination of factors, including the role of money, trade, and war booty in creating an aristocracy of wealth in the Roman population over the preced­ing century and the enfranchisement of men from Latin and Italian towns with the same rating as their Roman counterparts.¹⁰⁸ Nonetheless, the Romans con­tinued to restrict membership in the elite group of equestrians with a public horse to 1,800 or 2,400 men.¹⁰⁹ Perhaps the traditional ceiling reflected Roman belief over the centuries that this number represented the traditional dimen­sions of Rome's highest status group; or it represented an effort to control entry into that group.¹¹⁰ Not surprisingly the men whose wealth qualified them for registration in the equestrian class far exceeded that restricted group. These men, technically labeled tribuni aerarii, also come to be called equestrians even though they were formally registered in Class 1.¹¹¹ In short, entry into the high­est property class was somewhat flexible.

Correspondingly flexible was entry into and removal from Classes 1 through 5, given the changing economic prospects and resources of ordinary citizens as reflected (eventually) in the assets needed for membership in these property classes. At some point, the Romans expressed the requirements of the various classes in asses (and, after the adjustments in Rome's coinage, sesterces), as shown in table 5.2. By the time these equivalents become known to us there are huge gaps between some classes. In the late third and early second centuries, the minimum worth of an equestrian was fixed at 1,000,000 asses, ten times that of Class 1, fixed at 100,000 asses (this was later raised to 120,000).¹¹² At the same time Class 4 was 25,000 (or 20,000) asses, over five times higher than Class 5, 4,000 asses. By the end of the second century, Class 5 had been low­ered to 375 sesterces, six times less than Class 4. Here in microcosm is the grow­ing disparity among members of Roman society right before Rome's greatest overseas expansion.

What the monetary rates replaced is not known, but land values certainly underpin the amounts on our table: Worth was always measured in terms of land. More precisely, the rates reflect a valuation of land based on the fertility (ubertas) of land in ownership, that is, the output or productivity, as attested by the landholder in his declaration (professio) to the censors.¹¹³ In the same way, land rents were based on yields, not acreage.¹¹⁴ Sadly, we do not know the formula Roman censors employed to assign a money equivalent to the given set of assets whose valuation constituted a citizen's census or whether the “fer­tility” in question was tied to the potential or the actual productivity of spec­ified properties. The developing practice of centuriation between the fourth and second centuries, when the Romans were appropriating lands of varying agricultural qualities and uses, implies a conscious effort to systematize the busi­ness of measuring potential output. Men used to the friable soil of Latium needed a way of evaluating the wet plains of the Po River valley. Well before any such need becomes evident, however, and continuing long after, the frequency of Rome's distinctive census, to which we now turn, points to actual yields.

With puzzling regularity, Roman men traveled to Rome to declare them­selves, their families, and their holdings to the censors.¹¹⁵ Based on his per­sonal declaration (professio), the censors weighed each man's current economic standing and assigned or reassigned him to the appropriate property class.¹¹⁶ Such a task we may readily imagine was not performed by the censors alone, notwithstanding the report of Pliny the Elder about one Roman censor of prodi­gious memory who knew the name of every Roman citizen. In point of fact, the censors depended heavily on the knowledgeable assistance of that small num­ber of Romans whose role in civic life, although virtually unreported, was of fundamental importance, namely, the 175 curatores tribuum from Rome's thirty- five tribes. Elected tribe by tribe, to the number of five in each tribe from each of Rome's five numbered classes, the curatores functioned as supervisors of their classes.¹¹⁷ As each tribe was summoned for review and the tribesmen filed by the censors to make their declarations, man by man, the tribe's curatores stood by, ready to confirm a man's personal declaration or to fill in the gaps for absen­tees. Keeping track of local changes affecting a tribe's membership, the cura­tores had firsthand knowledge about the status of private property in the tribe and about the circumstances of fellow tribesmen in their classes. The curatores' function as ready sources of information on such matters accounts for the tribal unit of assessment employed at the census. In this way, the censors scrupulously reviewed a citizen population numbering, by the end of the second century, about three hundred thousand men. The chief product of this review was a list­ing of all citizens, citizen households, and citizen assets from which was developed a separate listing of all available fighting men (males between the ages of seventeen and sixty) and their classification. The objective was twofold: the review kept the Roman Senate and elected leaders fully and accurately informed about the number of Rome's fighting men, and it determined the vot­ers for the 193 centuries of the centuriate assembly. Astonishingly, the lengthy process required to meet this objective was repeated every five years, down to the first century.¹¹⁸

The regular, five-year cycle of review, unusual even in antiquity, merits exam­ination, particularly in view of the eventual size of the Roman population and the land area over which it spread.¹¹⁹ Other ancient states and empires, includ­ing the Roman Empire, experienced more leisurely cycles of enumeration and assessment—fourteen years in the case of Ptolemaic Egypt—if indeed there was a regular cycle at all.¹²⁰ Since the advent of the modern census in the eighteenth century, the customary cycle is ten years in length.¹²¹ Although the rationale for a cycle of ten years' duration is nowhere explicitly stated, before the twenti­eth century, it most likely reflects different social, political, and economic exi­gencies than Rome experienced.¹²² These differences, at any rate, probably explain the ten-year cycle adopted by the drafters of the U.S. Constitution, who established a census for the purpose of determining the number of representa­tives elected in the individual states of the new United States.¹²³ The men attending the Constitutional Convention proposed cycles of five to seven, ten, fifteen, and twenty years. They settled on a ten-year cycle.¹²⁴ Facing compara­ble restrictions with respect to communications and transportation, the Roman state nonetheless mounted a full-scale assessment of its people every five years. What explains the significantly shorter length of the Roman cycle?

From the Romans' perspective, a five-year cycle most closely encompassed the chaotic spins and twists to which Roman citizens were subject, especially with respect to the land. Between the fourth and second centuries, Romans individually experienced rapidly changing circumstances. During this period Romans went to war in high numbers and with increasing frequency. The Roman population dispersed and increased, as new land resources became available. Migrants encountered varied climatic and soil conditions across central Italy, where by 241 Rome had created fourteen new rural tribes. Roman farms and ranches in the Velina tribe, along the mountainous eastern coast, faced dif­ferent conditions than their counterparts in the Falerna enjoying the rich soil of Campania. Sweeping variations in Italy's arable land ensured that the change­able character of Roman life became highly localized, too, a trend reinforced by the creation of self-regulating tribes and tribal extensions. All the same, Romans everywhere faced the common adversities of premodern life: crops failed, animals and men died, and war intervened. Farmers in all the tribes expe­rienced good years and bad, and the smaller the farm the slimmer the buffer between continuation and disaster. A productive farm could slide quickly into ruin, leaving its owner with insufficient assets for registration in the same class. Conversely, a land grant in a new colony could provide a man with sufficient assets for registration, perhaps for the first time, as an assiduus. In effect a man's census, monitored during the regular enumeration of citizens, encapsulated the circumstances of the previous five years and gave him a “place” in the military and political structure of the state for the next five years.¹²⁵

A tenacious link between the property ratings and land yields persisted long after the monetization of the system, as the reductions described at the begin­ning of this section attest. The first reduction was most likely made in 214, in response to heavy losses during the Second Punic War.¹²⁶ The second may be tied to Rome's wars in the years immediately before 133, when the tribune Ti. Gracchus attempted to increase the number of citizens available for military service in the infantry (Classes 1 through 5) through the redistribution of ager publicus. As with the ratings themselves we are uncertain about the underly­ing circumstances. Did more men have less land and thus fell below the classes? Most modern historians take this scenario for granted. Or did an uncon­trolled influx of hard cash into Italy contribute to a decrease in prices and a corresponding decrease in the valuation of the output of existing holdings, so that Romans with land found that their assets were insufficient for registration as assidui?¹²⁷ In any event, even when the Class 5 qualification was lowered to 1,500 uncial asses (375 sesterces), sometime before 129, the sum is still sub­stantial in terms of first-century buying power, considering that a month's ration of wheat, 5 modii, cost HS 3 at first-century prices.¹²⁸

The disparity among members of Roman society reflected in the property ratings underlies the organization of the centuriate assembly, which, unlike the tribal assemblies, reflected the economic and status divisions in Roman society. For the purpose of voting the property classes were divided into a dis­proportionate number of centuries, each of which carried one vote. (Table 5.2. displays the close relationship between property classes and centuries in the first century). The higher the property class, the more centuries it con­tained. Hence, as measured by centuries, well-to-do Romans had more voting power than Romans who were less prosperous, although, as A. Yakobsen has conclusively shown, the voting power of ordinary Romans was signifi­cant.¹²⁹ What the table does not show is the further disparity between the concentration of centuries in the highest property classes and the number of men holding those ratings. In particular Class 1, which held comparatively few citizens, nonetheless had the most centuries, 80 out of 193, and conse­quently the most votes. Below the men of Class 1 were the much more numer­ous members of Class 2, divided into only 20 centuries; above them were the equites equo publico, restricted to 1,800 to 2,400 men but divided into 18 cen­turies with eighteen votes. To all appearances we are dealing with an explicit formula calculated to ensure that the outcome of the voting in the centuriate assembly reflected the will of the most prosperous Romans.

The formal pivot of the union of Roman, Latin, and Italian in Roman citi­zenship was the tribal system. The potential of the Roman tribes in absorbing new citizens is revealed in the reform of the centuriate assembly toward the end of the third century.¹³⁰ Within a generation of the creation of the last two tribes in 241, the 170 centuries constituting Classes 1 through 5, which formed the core of the centuriate assembly, were disbanded and reconstituted in such a fashion that in each class each century held members from only one tribe and in each class each tribe supplied two centuries—one of fighting men (iuniores) and one of reserves (seniores).¹³¹ Thus, Class 1 held 70 centuries, two from each of the thirty-five tribes, as probably did Class 2 and also Classes 3, 4, and 5. Yet, as we shall see later, centuries were conflated into voting units in such a way that the total voting capacity of the five classes remained what it had been before, namely 170 votes, despite the actual increase in the number of centuries.

Significantly omitted from this reform were the highest- and lowest-rank­ing members of Roman society, neither of whom served in the infantry. Above Class 1 were the equites equo publico, in eighteen centuries, whose numbers included senators until 129. Below Class 5 stood five noncombatant centuries— four of them technicians of a sort, namely, engineers (fabri); trumpeters (liticines); horn blowers (cornicines); and servants (accensi velati); and the last the Roman proletarii, so called because they could provide only children (proles) for the state, thought to comprise a majority of the Roman people from the second century onward. Thus, the cavalrymen and the noncombatants formed an excep­tion to the tribal basis of the new organization of the five classes of foot soldiers in that they filled centuries indiscriminately, without regard to tribal affiliation. Notwithstanding the exception at either end of the social range, the essential difference between the old and the new centuriate assembly was provided by the cohesive force of the tribe. In the new assembly, citizens cast their votes not only as members of a property class but also as tribesmen.

The ramifications of this tribe-oriented reorganization become evident when we consider the complicated voting procedures of the centuriate assembly.¹³² Voting commenced with one century of fighting men drawn by lot from Class i, called the centuria praerogativa; the results of their vote were announced on completion.¹³³ Then followed voting by the remaining sixty-nine centuries in Class i, perhaps successively and hierarchically—that is, the thirty-four remain­ing centuries of fighting men cast their votes first and after them the thirty-five centuries of reserves. Next came the twelve centuries of equestrians with a pub­lic horse, and then the noncombatant century of engineers (fabri), which might have voted with the thirty-four centuries of fighting men. When these cen­turies had voted, the results of the vote were announced, the herald calling on a spokesman from each century to relay how the century had voted.¹³⁴ The next centuries to vote were the six centuries, six hundred men, of equestrians with a public horse, who constituted the elite group known as “six votes” (sex suffragia). The results of the vote were again announced. At this point the vot­ing procedure of the reformed assembly changed.

Beginning with the votes of the men of Class 2, the principle of “one cen­tury one vote” gave way to a different principle. Once the 70 centuries of Class 1, the 18 centuries of cavalrymen, and the single noncombatant century of engi­neers had voted, 89 votes had been cast out of an absolute total of 193. There remained i04 possible votes. But after the reform there were considerably more centuries still to vote. Consequently, beginning with Class 2 and extending through Class 5 as well as the four remaining noncombatant centuries—the trumpeters, the horn blowers, the servants, and Romans without a ranking (pro­letarii)—the centuries voted in combination. Lily Ross Taylor, building on ear­lier suggestions by Mommsen and drawing on the procedure detailed in the draft statute of ii CE known as the Tabula Hebana concerning the procedure for voting honors to the dead Germanicus, has contrived this likely reconstruc­tion: Before the men of Class 2 cast their votes, which were probably twenty in number, the names of the thirty-five tribes were drawn by lot to determine in which of ten urns members of the thirty-five centuries of fighting men would deposit their ballots and in which of ten urns members of the thirty-five cen­turies of reserves would deposit theirs. The voting of Classes 3 through 5, as well as that of the four noncombatant centuries (perhaps included with Class 5), were handled in the same fashion, by combining the centuries by lot.¹³⁵

Playing throughout these complicated procedures, as an essential but unvoiced measure, were the thirty-five tribes. Each century in the five classes that voted in effect voted as the subunit of a tribe. Each tribe held ten centuries for the purposes of the centuriate assembly, tribesmen forming two sets of five centuries according to age and property class. How the centuries of a given tribe voted was a matter of immediate public knowledge. The tribe, at specific points in the proceedings, mattered: first, on the selection of the first century to cast its vote (centuria praerogativa)—made by drawing a name from the urn for the lots, which held the names of all thirty-five tribes—which voted first and whose vote was announced in advance of the other voting; and second, on the announcement of the voting results from Class 1, which also entailed identi­fying the tribe of each century. Presumably, identifying the tribes had a similar impact in both instances. For the announcement of voting results for each cen­tury of the first class was an announcement of how the wealthiest members of each tribe voted. Knowing the importance that Romans attached to status in the voting and any other arena, we may imagine the effect on the Romilian century of fighting men, say, of Class 2 when the Romilian century of Class 1 voted in favor of a particular slate of candidates. Of course, in the case of the centuria praerogativa, selected by lot, the effect was tempered by divine inter­vention; Jupiter was again instrumental when the tribes entered the procedure of the centuriate assembly for a third time.¹³⁶ The centuries of Class 2 did not vote as single units but as combinations: seventy centuries, representing the tribesmen of thirty-five tribes, cast twenty votes. The combination of cen­turies was achieved randomly by placing the names of the thirty-five tribes into the urn for the lot and drawing names out again, once for the centuries of fight­ing men and once for the reserves. In summary, the voting procedure of the cen­turiate assembly turned at crucial moments on the tribes. Fully mindful of the importance of the tribes, Q. Tullius Cicero advised his brother to learn the tribal locations and memberships in order to campaign effectively for high office.¹³⁷

Behind its organizational framework of centuries and property qualifications the reformed centuriate assembly hid the fundamental unifying role of the tribe in building the assembly.¹³⁸ Arguably this was because the tribal role subsumed a panoply of assumptions shared by the Roman people that were never voiced; rather, they were taken implicitly for granted. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that the potential cohesive force of the Roman tribes was built into the reformed centuriate assembly in the mid- to late third century.

In the reform of the centuriate assembly, the tribal potential for cohesion is critical but submerged. This cohesive force is more easily identified in the func­tions of the tribal assembly, where the tribes formed the actual voting units and were not submerged in the centuries. In consequence of the lex Publilia of 471, which made tribes rather than curiae responsible for the election of plebeian officials, the foremost political manifestation of tribal organization is the full tribal assembly of the Roman people (comitia tributa) and its modified version, the plebeian tribal assembly (concilium plebis).¹³⁹ The steadily increasing role of the tribal assemblies thereafter provides compelling evidence of the weight of the tribes in Roman political life. Among the business handled by the tribes, public lawmaking was of primary importance to the direction of the Roman state. Routinely as well the tribal assembly met (in July like the centuriate assembly) to elect the minor officeholders of Rome (magistratus minores): quaestors and military tribunes (tribuni militum); tribunes and plebeian aediles when the tribal assembly was constituted as the plebeian tribal assembly, presided over by tribunes and rid of patricians; at different times, decemviri litibus iudi- candis, quattuorviri praefecti C.C., tresviri capitales, and tresviri a.d.a.; and in dif­ferent combinations of tribes (to the number of seventeen) selected by lot, the priests (pontifices) and even the chief priest (pontifex maximus). Noteworthy about the lesser magistrates selected by the tribes is their immediate involve­ment in the legal, military, and administrative routines of the Roman state. These are the officials with whom most people might expect to come into con­tact, in the city, in colonies, or in military camp. Doubtless the election of Rome's minor officeholders was important to Romans, despite the inatten­tion of our sources to these elections compared to the elections of praetors and consuls in the same month, because the candidates over time came more and more from municipalities. For such men, success at the polls provided an oppor­tunity for entry into the ruling circle. Success depended, however, on their abil­ity to tap into vital tribal networks.

The personal relationships maintained at the tribal level are borne out by the requirements of civic life. Official confirmation of status and worth, as a freeborn member of the Roman state, required a man's physical presence at the quinquennial census, when the Roman censors reviewed the citizen list and noted the property and family of each man who presented himself, with the help of the curatores tribuum (discussed previously). Every Roman was known to the officials of his tribe. In the second century, the Romans began to regu­larly include tribal affiliation as part of their formal self-designation. The lex Repetundarum of the Gracchan period instructed the praetor to post the names of 450 jurors, giving not only their filiation and cognomina but their tribal affil­iation.¹⁴⁰ The practice, we know from other epigraphic material, was observed until the imperial period.¹⁴¹ It is apparent that tribal affiliation came into play in the changing legal procedures of the second and first centuries, although how it did is regrettably obscure. We have the impression from a number of laws that the parties to a suit paid attention to tribal affiliation when selecting jurors from the larger panel.¹⁴² The impression is reinforced by the special tribal elections enacted by the lex Plautia in 89 to select 15 jurors from each tribe, that is, by the tribesmen of each tribe, for the standing court instituted by the statute of Q. Varius to decide cases of treason and held again in 81 to choose the 300 equestrians for Sulla's expanded Senate and again in 70 to select the jurors of the three panels instituted by the lex Aurelia.¹⁴³ Routinely, too, the tribes selected the 105 men-3 from each tribe—who sat as the centumviral court or court of One Hundred Men (centumviri).¹⁴⁴ In matters of law, in par­ticular of legal decisions, the Romans were clearly conscious and careful of the tribal voice and tribal loyalties. In such arrangements it is clear that the tribes had become the central locus for maintaining the social and political net­works of the new Roman state by the second century.

More compelling evidence of the growing importance of the tribes in Roman political life is the greatly increased role of the tribal assemblies and the greatly diminished role of the centuriate assembly after the late third century in enact­ing law.¹⁴⁵ Even after the demise of the Republic, Roman tribes for a time retained a symbolic importance. In the late first century BCE, honors decreed to foreigners who had aided Rome in times of military need and to non-Roman veterans sometimes included citizenship and the privilege of enrollment in a tribe.¹⁴⁶ Long before then, the tribes had also become the chief mechanism for the absorption of new citizens.

New citizens like new lands had to be accommodated to the tribal system. As long as the numbers of new citizens were small, such accommodation was rela­tively direct. Newly created tribes or tribal extensions were sometimes filled with new citizens. The Quirina tribe, created in 241 on territory confiscated from the Sabini, was filled with Sabini, granted incomplete citizenship at the beginning of the third century, and now made full citizens.¹⁴⁷ But when the gradual accre­tions to the Roman citizen population became an avalanche as a result of the statutes of 90 and 89, the matter of tribal assignment was controversial because the new citizens outnumbered the old. We shall return to the controversy and its resolution in part 3. Suffice to say that arrangements for new citizens were slow in coming over the years between 86 and 49, and they came at great cost.¹⁴⁸ Always the Romans strove to maintain the integrity of the traditional system.

But over time the registration of new citizens in the Roman tribes entailed a massive yet assiduously practical shuffle. Lily Ross Taylor has assembled a con­venient list of Italian communities, organized by Augustan region, identifying their tribes and including dates of full incorporation, when known; many are not known.¹⁴⁹ Towns in regions that were previously Roman territory, and thus already had a tribal affiliation, kept the same tribe. Latin colonies were enrolled in the tribes to which their leading magistrates already belonged.¹⁵⁰ The Ital­ian peoples tended to be enrolled in tribes that were nearby or adjoining their lands already. Thus, the Aurunci were enrolled in the Teretina, established in 299, along the coast between the Volturnus and Liris Rivers in territory con­fiscated from that people.¹⁵¹ Often, too, the principle was followed of putting the same peoples in the same tribes. Most of the Hernici, for instance, were enrolled in the Poblilia, established in 358 on land confiscated from the Her­nici, after a few of their numbers had entered the tribe in earlier generations. By 90 the Poblilia was “already recognized as the tribe of that people.”¹⁵² Sim­ilarly the Vestini were enrolled in the Quirina; and the Paeligni and Marsi in the Sergia. The outcome was a solidly ethnic infusion in many of the individ­ual rural tribes—usually viewed as a way of diminishing the importance of the tribe's vote.¹⁵³ In some districts the Roman tribes took on a distinctly Ital­ian cast. As a result, the tendency for membership in a Roman tribe to provide a group identity was reinforced by the influx of new tribesmen who were in pos­session of a strong sense of group or ethnic identity to begin with. While the initial considerations determining the new tribal assignments and their polit­ical results vary greatly from one region of Italy to another, what is most strik­ing is the Romans' recognition of local ties and local political culture in the registration of new citizens in Roman tribes, both before and after 90.¹⁵⁴

Accordingly, several generations after the reform of the centuriate assembly the cohesive potential of the tribes manifested itself more fully. Different mean­ings had been attached to tribal membership in the second century. Still more changes ensued as a consequence of the grant of citizenship to Italian peo­ples in 90. Hereafter, the diversity in form and local function of town centers changed, as the Romans imposed a greater political uniformity on Italy. The notion of tribes as territorial districts made up of the private landholdings of citizens was transformed. Tribes became the districts of individual towns, municipia where some of the tribal functions such as census registration once carried out in Rome now occurred, certainly by the time of Caesar.¹⁵⁵ In accept­ing Roman citizenship, Italian communities also accepted Roman law and administrative organization. Local offices and tribal positions were modified to conform to a Roman system of administration. Quattuorviri or duoviri replaced meddici, for example, as local officials assumed the titles of Roman counter­parts.¹⁵⁶ By the middle of the first century, Italy was becoming a region of munic­ipalities, on the model of earlier Latin municipia and coloniae, as the complexities of fora, conciliabula, oppida, vici, and pagi were disappearing. The process called the “municipalization” of Italy had begun, by which modern historians understand the creation of a bureaucratic apparatus centered on towns that made Italy an administrative whole.¹⁵⁷ Scholars believe that towns replaced tribes, after 89, as the focal point for social and political relationships, espe­cially where tribal lands were widely scattered across Italy.¹⁵⁸ But, whether in the accommodation of Italian towns to Roman tribes or the modification of the names of Italian administrative offices along Roman lines, manifest in these Italy-wide changes, Roman flexibility in the face of existing conditions as well as Italian adaptation to Roman ways are clearly visible. The Roman genius for using customary arrangements to deal with the challenges of geographic and demographic expansion as they arose had again produced a potentially resilient, functioning, and effective political and social system.

CONCLUSION

Beginning in the fourth century, the Romans expanded across Italy in a broad­scale effort, redirecting traditional life to function along Roman lines. The foun­dation of this program was constructed on individual alliances with the various Italian groups whose primary requirement was that conquered peoples furnish an assigned number of troops to serve alongside Romans in further campaigns of conquest. Equally important were the periodic grants of citizenship that Romans had for centuries extended to select communities and elite members of Italian communities together with tribal membership and registration in the highest property classes. Although less readily granted to the majority popu­lation, citizenship was nonetheless desired, and sometimes achieved, by many members of the larger Italian society, especially those who had served with the Roman army. The success of the Roman absorption of Italians is seen not only in the eventual increase in the number of citizens but in the prosperous expan­sion of the Roman state.¹⁵⁹

The magnitude of the Roman achievement in bringing the Italian peoples together as Roman citizens was matched by the commitment of the newcom­ers to the Roman system and the degree to which they became fully function­ing members of the Roman state. The passions and commitment of the combatants on both sides in the Italian War reveal firm agreement among the peoples of Italy about the primary importance of citizenship in opening access to the privileges of full membership in the Roman state. The bedrock on which these achievements rested was the Roman practice of allowing both new and rehabilitated citizens full access to the vote and the political process as mem­bers of a Roman tribe and property class. On receipt of citizenship outsiders formally entered the Roman state through registration in a Roman tribe and property class, achieved by making declaration of their property holdings and places of residence before the censors in Rome on the occasion of the quin­quennial census. By the first century, grants of citizenship, military service, and the everyday demands of life in the Roman world had created a wide variety of structures of accommodation—economic, political, and military—between Romans and Italians on all levels.

The permeability of Roman citizenship made possible the erection of Roman structures of order in Italy. While citizenship grants were sometimes a result of action by the Roman Senate, just as adjustments in property ratings were prob­ably achieved by a commander’s fiat, at other critical moments when the deci­sion was somewhat controversial the incorporation of outsiders was approved by vote of the people in a lawmaking assembly. The most critical moment came during the Italian War of 91-89. Called together in a voting assembly to con­sider a proposal of law, Romans agreed as a people to a major redirection of their goals on granting citizenship. Allies could henceforth be Roman. Thus in the process of incorporation, as on other aspects of the expansion across Italy, pub­lic lawmaking assemblies gave the Romans a forum for developing community consensus on many of the more controversial decisions. Equally important, cit­izens from throughout the conquered lands were provided with an institutional means to focus their political energies on Rome, thus strengthening support for Roman decisions in dealing with the conquered territories, to the point where the Italian allies were eventually prepared to die in their struggle to acquire full Roman citizenship. The organization and deployment of Italians alongside the Romans were vital in furthering the absorption of a conquered group by mak­ing Roman citizenship acceptable to a great number of people. The grant of cit­izenship that signaled a finish to the Italian War represented the tail end of a process of military service and selective citizenship grants that had character­ized the interaction between Romans and Italians for centuries. Equally impor­tant in making citizenship acceptable was the flexibility of the institution itself, which allowed for the continual reintegration of failed citizens as effective mem­bers of the Roman state.

Overall the magnitude of the Roman achievement in bringing the Italian peoples together as Roman citizens was matched by the commitment of the newcomers to the Roman system and the degree to which they became fully functioning members of the Roman state. We can see how public lawmaking assemblies, which gave legitimacy to many of the more controversial decisions by the Romans to expand citizenship, were in turn strengthened by the expan­sion and reinvigoration of the citizen body. Public lawmaking assemblies gave all citizens an institutional instrument for developing communitywide consen­sus that was unprecedented in ancient Mediterranean societies. New citizens

in particular were thus provided with an institutional means to focus their polit­ical energies on Rome. Among the more important indices of the successful absorption of Italian lands into the Roman system was the growing strength of this focus throughout Italy. By their reinterpretation of the concept of citizen, that is, divorcing it from territory, and by reordering their traditional tribal sys­tem to incorporate new citizens, the Romans imposed themselves on local net­works, creating a society increasingly centered on the city of Rome. Showing their unique talent for resorting to customary procedures to control their expand­ing possessions, the Romans adjusted traditional institutions to create a Roman state in Italy whose focus was the city of Rome.

TABLE 5.1 Laws Relating to Citizen Status and Citizen Liberties, 350—91

(continued)

TABLE 5.1 (continued)

Source: See appendixes A and C.

^aDates in parentheses are approximate. See appendix C.

TABLE 5.2. Property Ratings and Voting Units, ca. 200—140

Source: Nicolet 1966-74, vol.1, and Brunt 1988 (monetary equivalent of equestrian rating); Rathbone 1993 (monetary equivalent of classes 1 through 5); Taylor 1966 (cen­turies).

Notes

1. Polyb. 2.24.10-17

2. H. Galsterer, “Die lex Osca tabulae Bantina: Eine Bestandsaufnahme,” Chiron 1 (1971): 191-214; RS 1 No.13. Such displays, along with the economic advances of the second century manifested in the adornment and expansion of Italian towns, have led to the presumption that Italians did not want to be included in the Roman state, e.g., Crawford 1981, 159. The recent study on the ideological underpinnings of alternative points of view by Mouritsen 1998 covers the topic thoroughly. However, a sense of being Italian does not preclude any desire to be included in the Roman state.

3. Strabo 6.1.2-3.

4. Taylor i960, 123-24. On the law of 49 see chapter 9.

5. The issues surrounding Roman citizenship are exceedingly complex. The indis­pensable guide is Sherwin-White 1973.

6. The suggested figures in Brunt 1971, 26-43, are useful as a rough guide.

7. Livy 6.25.26; Dion. Hal. 14.6.2; Festus p. 155L.

8. Salmon 1982, 46.

9. Livy 8.14.2-4.

10. For a brief summary see Salmon 1982, 47.

11. On this topic see M. Humbert, Municipium et civitas sine suffragio: L’organisation de la conquete jusqu’ä la guerre sociale (Paris, 1978).

12. Humbert 1978, 280-81. Cf. Lintott 1999, 33-34: “Provocatio was later regarded as one of the principal rights of the individual Roman citizen, a theoretical guarantee against execution without trial and, after the lex Porcia of Cato the Censor, against flog­ging.” Provocatio: D. Cloud, “The constitution and public criminal law,” CAH 9, 2d ed. (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, and Sydney, 1994), 493-94; A. Lintott, “Provocatio: From the struggle of the orders to the principate,” in ANRW 1.2.226-67.

13. Cives sine suffragio: Sherwin-White 1973, 38-58; Humbert 1978, 164-208.

14. Grant of full citizenship to the Sabines: Vell. Pat. 1.14.7; Sherwin-White 1973, 50-5i.

15. Humbert 1978, 209-50.

16. Livy 8.14.10.

17. Sherwin-White 1973, 291-92.

18. Sherwin-White 1973, 111.

19. Lex Repetundarum: RS 1 No. 1, l. 77.

20. Sherwin-White i973, 322-24.

21. Sherwin-White 1973, 120: the Romans attached most of the Italians to the Roman state through individual alliances, in particular the Oscan-speaking peoples, “the mainstay of their federation.”

22. For these considerations see especially Sherwin-White 1973, 58-73, on the incorporation of outside communities and the consequent changes in their internal political organization and life.

23. They continued to share significant privileges with the Romans: intermarriage, making contracts and wills, and migration to Rome. These in fact are the privileges that members of municipia also shared with the Romans, clearly derived from the shared community privileges of the inhabitants of Latium, including Romans.

24. As a corollary the inhabitants of Latin towns were not registered on the Roman tribal rolls at the quinquennial census in Rome for which every citizen presented him­self. Instead the Latin rolls—used for purposes of military service and taxation—were compiled by the municipal magistrates and sent to Rome.

25. Similarly, beginning in 204 the censors of the twelve Latin colonies founded around 268, who at times have been thought to hold inferior status, submitted the local censuses under their jurisdiction to the censors in Rome and apparently continued to do so thereafter—as did other municipalities it appears. On the inferior position of the twelve colonies see Mommsen, R.St. 3.623 ff; Beloch 1880, 155 ff. Sherwin-White dis­agrees that there were any “special grades of Latinity”: Sherwin-White 1973, 102-8, esp.

104. Census of other municipia: Galsterer 1976, 110-16.

26. Brunt 1971, 29.

27. Cf. Sherwin-White 1973, 292-93.

28. Livy 25.3.16 first mentions it during the Second Punic War, although Dion. Hal. considers the right to be ancient in origin (8.72.4): see Sherwin-White 1973, 35 and 112.

29. The ius migrationis or ius mutandae civitatis: Sherwin-White 1973, 111 and 112.

30. On the joint Roman-Latin colonies of the fifth and early fourth centuries see Cornell 1995, 301-4, who notes Beloch's belief that at least half of the colonists were from Rome and the remainder Latin or Hernican. Beloch 1880, 134, 152.

31. Sherwin-White 1973, 96-116.

32. Sherwin-White 1973, 61; cf 57: the Romans were unwilling in the fourth and third centuries to incorporate non-Latin people completely. Individual grants to non­Romans appear first at the end of the century as rewards to foreigners who helped the Romans in the war with Carthage.

33. Sherwin-White 1973, 292.

34. The proposed destruction of Tusculum in 323, presented unsuccessfully to the people by the tribune M. Flavius, has been interpreted by Mommsen, followed by Tay­lor, as an attack on the town's full citizen status granted less than a generation before when one of its member presented himself as a candidate for consul. See Taylor i960, 302.

35. Livy 38.36.7-9. Not since 329 had full citizenship been extended to a commu­nity by public law.

36. These are collected in Badian 1958, 302-8, from the later Republic. Such grants only occur in the later period, beginning with Marius: Sherwin-White 1973, 294-95.

37. Brunt 1988, 98.

38. It was after this event, Brunt suggests, that the Romans extended to Latins the right of acquiring full citizenship through holding local office, “as a conciliatory ges­ture”: Brunt i988, 96.

39. Livy 8.17.12. The phrase, which applies specifically to the cives sine suffragio, appears first in the poetry of Ennius: Sherwin-White 1973, 41-42.

40. The meaning of restricted citizenship: Sherwin-White 1973, 49-50; Humbert 1978, 205-7.

4^{1 Liv}y 9.45.7.

42. This created a situation, in Sherwin-White's estimation, that exacerbated the allies' demand for equality with Romans and Latins in Italy: Sherwin-White i973, i40.

43. Allies who remained loyal and those who stopped fighting: Gabba 1994a, 123 (“it may be that the condition was met principally by the Etruscans and Umbrians”).

44. On Italian acculturation generally see David i996. David places more emphasis on the aristocracy than I do here and identifies somewhat different “mecha­nisms of unification.” See also M.H. Crawford, “Italy and Rome from Sulla to Augus­tus,” in CAH 10, 2d ed., ed. A. K. Bowman, E. Champlin, and A. Lintott (Cambridge, 1996). The important contributions of archaeology to the topic are presented in the survey article by Curti, Dench, and Patterson 1996, 170-89. Recent studies (in English) addressing the process of acculturation in specific regions include G. Bradley, Umbria (Oxford, 2000), 190-245, and Keay and Terrenato 2001.

45. Badian 1958, 146-49.

46. Salmon 1982, 140-41; W. V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 177-79. On Umbria see Bradley 2000, 203-17.

47. Vetter 1953, P. Poccetti, Nuovi documenti italici (Pisa, 1979).

48. Language and acculturation: E. Benelli, “The Romanization of Italy through the epigraphic record,” in Keay and Terrenato 2001, 7-16.

49. Although Greek, the language of the original Greek colonists who estab­lished Cumae, appears to have been regarded as the language of status, Oscan and other languages continued in common use if we go by the evidence of inscriptions. Greek: K. Lomas, “Urban elites and cultural definition,” in Urban society in Roman Italy, ed. T. Cornell and K. Lomas (London, 1995), 110-11.

50. Zanker 1976 is fundamental. See also K. Lomas, Rome and the western Greeks, 350-AD 200 (London and New York, 1993), 161-87; Lomas 1995; and the discussion of recent scholarship in Curti, Dench, and Patterson 1996, 180-89. Mouritsen 1998, 60-67, provides a useful overview of the topic.

51. This is assumed in many studies addressing quite different topics, for instance, E. Rawson, Intellectual life in the late Roman republic (Baltimore, 1985), and E. Gruen, National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, NY, 1992).

52. Livy 42.21.4.

53. Livy 42.22.7.

54. See chapter 1, note 11, on Appian's Italiotai.

55. Cf. the lex lunia of 126, which was probably intended to send Italians away from Rome before the vote on Flaccus's citizenship bill: Brunt 1988, 96.

56. Cf. the effort of Etruscans and Umbrians who came to Rome in 91 to discour­age voters from accepting Drusus's land and colonization measures: Appian, B.C. 1.36. See Brunt 1988, 106; Harris 1971, 212 ff.

57. On these conditions see Beloch 1880, 158-77, and further the analyses by W. Dahlheim, Struktur und Entwicklung des romischen Volkerrechts im 3. und 2. Jahrhundert v. Chr. (Munich, 1968), and Galsterer 1976. More briefly see Salmon 1982, 39-72, which notes (p. 59) that we cannot prove how much land the Romans took. Only rarely were the conditions enacted as law in lawmaking assemblies.

58. Military obligations: Galsterer 1976, 105-10; see also V. Ilari, Gli Italici nelle strutture militari romane (Milan, 1974).

59. D. W. Baronowski, “The formula togatorum,” Hist. 33 (1984): 248-52; Brunt 1971, 545-48; Beloch 1880, 202-7.

60. This idea is not new, in the Roman context or generally: Preface, note 10. The shared experiences of infantrymen in bloody battle are less important in this connec­tion than the mechanical routines of daily life in base camps, which consumed most of their time under arms. S. A. Stouffer et al., The American soldier: Adjustment during army life (Princeton, NJ, 1949-1950), offers a detailed analysis of the ways in which marginal groups effectively entered American society through military service. The anthropologist L. Pospisil also makes useful observations on this point in The anthropol­ogy of law: A comparative theory (New York 1971).

6i. The figures used in the following discussion of the proportion of Roman and Ital­ian men in military service are based on the reported number of Roman legions under arms every year, the full-strength complement of a legion at different times, and the esti­mated size of the allied component of the Roman army, collected in Brunt 1971, 416-514. I discuss these figures in an article in preparation, “The Roman population, 225-31.”

62. Ordinarily, males ages forty-six to sixty who in principle qualified as reserves (seniores) were exempt from military service, like priests: see discussion by Brunt 1971, 21.

63. Polyb. 2.24.10-17. The Roman figure includes Romans and Campanians, the latter partial citizens (sine suffragio).

64. Brunt 1971, 54; recorded in Polyb. 2.24.10-17.

65. Williamson, “The Roman population, 225-31,” article in preparation.

66. Military emergency was defined specifically as a Gallic invasion (tumultus gal­licus): Appian, B.C., 2.150. On the end of military obligations: Polyb. 6.19.2; Livy 43.14.6.

67. Brunt 1971, 399-402.

68. We owe our information about the annual levy of troops for legions 1-4 to Poly­bius, who describes the event purportedly as it happened in his day. See further chapter 6.

69. E.g., Julius Caesar in Transpadane Gaul, during his campaign in Gaul, but in this case conscripts were not citizens but Latins.

70. General coverage of all aspects of equipment and supply: L. Keppie, The mak­ing of the Roman army: From republic to empire (London, 1984). Equipment: M. C. Bishop and J. C. N. Coulston, Roman military equipment (London, 1993), 183.

71. The Macedonians under Philip II and Alexander came closest: N. Hammond, The Macedonian state (Oxford, 1989); and D. Engels, Alexander the Great and the logistics of the Macedonian army (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979).

72. Villa Publica: L. Richardson, ed., A new topographical dictionary of Rome (Bal­timore and London, 1992), 430-31; Aedes Nymphae: Richardson 1992, 269.

73. Military strength reports: A. K. Bowman and J. D. Thomas, “A military strength report from Vindolanda,” JRS 81(1991): 62-73.

74. Appian, B.C. 3.43. These daily record books, directed to and collated by the military tribunes, are discussed by A. von Premerstein, s.v. “Commentarii,” in PW 4.726. For a similar accounting of troops kept by Macedonian kings after Philip (in the Royal Journal) see Hammond 1989, 132, 190.

75. Bishop and Coulston 1993, 183.

76. J. Kromayer and G. Veith, Heerwesen und Kriegsführung der Griechen und Romer (Munich, 1928), 452.

77. Kromayer and Veith 1928, 268.

78. On the uses of writing see Harris 1989 and the more focused studies in J. H. Humphrey, ed., Literacy in the Roman world (Ann Arbor, MI, 1991).

79. There is some question whether the number was periodically revised or not.

80. Galsterer 1976, 110-17.

81. Livy 29.37.7; Beloch 1880, 311-12; Mommsen, R.St. 2. 351; Galsterer 1976, 110.

82. Kromayer and Veith 1928, 276. See Polyb. 6.26.5.

83. Kromayer and Veith 1928, 267.

84. The cult of the standards and shrine are attested only in the imperial period: A. von Domaszewski, “Die Religion des romischen Heeres,” Westd. Zeit. (1895): 9ff.

85. On the role of the military in the diffusion of coins throughout Italy see Craw­ford 1985, 36-38; on the mechanisms of diffusion see Crawford, “Army and coinage in the late republic,” La romanisation du Samnium aux Ile et ler siècles av. J.C. (Naples, 1991), ^I35^-37.

86. Sherwin-White 1973, 134-39, observes that it was these benefits, not citizenship as such, that made citizenship attractive to the allies. When the citizenship was not forth­coming, however, they went directly for their goal, equality in Italy with the Romans.

87. See note 12, this chapter.

88. See Brunt 1971, 75-77, 402-6; and E. Gabba, “The origins of the professional army at Rome: The ‘proletarii’ and marius’ reform,” in Republican Rome: The army and the allies, ed. E. Gabba (1976), 2-10. The most recent discussion of these reductions in terms of property values and size of landholdings is D. Rathbone, “The census qual­ifications of the assidui and the prima classis,” in De agricultura: In memoriam P.W. de Neeve, ed. H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg et al. (Amsterdam, 1993), 121-52, esp. 139-46.

89. Brunt 1971, 403-5; Rathbone 1993, 125.

90. The most important studies of the Roman tribes are Mommsen, R.St. 3.161-98, revising his earlier Die romischen Tribus in administrativer Beziehung (Altona, 1844); and Taylor i960.

91. Taylor i960, 74-75. The necessary ritual purification of the tribes followed. Representations of the ritual acts required by the lustrum are collected and discussed in I. Scott Ryberg, Rites of the state religion in Roman art (Rome, 1955), 104-19.

92. Tribes as a unique Roman institution: C. Ampolo, “La nascita della città,” in Storia di Roma, ed. A. Momigliano and A. Schiavone (Turin, 1988), 1.153-80.

93. Taylor i960, 35-46, provides the best discussion.

94. Contra Taylor i960, who argues (chap. 2 ) that new tribes had to be created by vote of the Roman people on the presumptive grounds that only the people could make such a societywide change. The censors’ oversight over land leases and the bronze forma or survey maps (Gran. Lic. 28.36: forma in Atrium Libertatis) suggests the likelihood of a more extensive involvement. Gargola 1995 shows clearly the complexity of the arrange­ments necessary to incorporate new lands into the Roman state.

95. Livy 8.17.11-12: Tribus propter eos additae Maecia et Scaptia; censores addiderunt Q. Publilius Philo Sp. Postumius.

96. The decision to create no more new tribes is probably also related to the reform of the centuriate assembly: Taylor i960, 68.

97. Taylor i960, 47-68 (new tribes), and 79-100 (tribal extensions before the Ital­ian War). On the proximity of Latin colonies see Taylor i960, 49.

98. So much so that it is sometimes argued that any Latin or Italian who came to own land through purchase or inheritance in a Roman tribe also gained Roman citizen­ship: J.S. Richardson, “The ownership of Italian land: Tiberius Gracchus and the Ital­ians,” JRS 70 (1980): I-11.

99. Urban tribes: Taylor i960, 132-49; see further chapter 6.

100. Hence, an assiduus need not be a landowner per se but a landowner with a val­uation that places him in Classes 1 through 5: A. Berger, Encyclopedic dictionary of Roman law (Philadelphia, 1953; reprint, 1991), 351, s.v. “Assidui.”

101. Taylor explains the voluntary transfers of nobles to the new tribes as a move to “establish control of new tribes”: Taylor i960, 299.

102. Staveley 1972, 136-37; cf. Vanderbroek 1987, 70; Brunt 1988, 25-26; Millar 1998, 36; Yakobsen 1999, 147 n. 82. This is not directly attested in the sources, how­ever.

103. Age at registration: Brunt 1971, 113-20.

104. The stages of adjustment in Rome's basic money standard is summarized in Rath­bone 1993, 123.

105. Equestrian class: C. Nicolet, L’ordre equestre ä l’epoque republicaine (Paris, 1966), vol. i; Brunt 1988, 144-93; T. P Wiseman, “The definition of ‘eques Romanus' in the late republic and early empire,” Hist. 19 (1970): 67-83.

106. Based on the presumed number of cavalrymen accompanying the four consular legions at this time.

107. Mommsen, R.St. 3.1.250-51, 272-73.

108. Polybius explicitly lumps the Campanians who were “citizens without the vote” together with the Romans.

109. Mommsen, R.St. 3.1.107 with n. 3, 259; Brunt 1988, 146.

110. See chapter 7.

111. Tribuni aerarii considered equestrians: Brunt 1988, 146 with 515-16, and 210 with n. 40. The tribuni aerarii are believed to be “old tribal officers” who collected the tributum from each tribe, before 167, and paid it to the army: Mommsen, R.St. 3.189-91; Taylor i960, 8 with n. 16; cf. Nicolet 1976, 46-55.

112. Classi qualifications: Rathbone i993, i2i-52, esp. i26-37.

113. Valuation based on fertility: Campbell 2000, 136.10; 170.4 (pro aestimio uber­tatis); 160.33; 202.22; 202.17 (ad modum ubertatis). Declaration of valuation: Campbell 2000, 136.10; 170.4; 174.5. These examples are from the reigns of Augustus and Ves­pasian, but they are no less valid for Republican practice; cf. the following note and Tab­ula Heracleensis (declarations). On the property assessment determining a citizen's census see G. Pieri, Histoire du cens jusqu’ä la fin de la republique Romaine (Paris, 1968), 47-50. On land values see also P. W de Neeve, “The price of agricultural land in Roman Italy and the problem of economic rationalism,” Opus 4 (1988): 77-109; P. W. de Neeve, Colonus: Private farm tenancy in Roman Italy during the republic and the early principate (Amsterdam, 1984), 171-73.

114. Rents: Cato, Agr. 136; Sententia Minuciorum (Bruns⁷ no. 184), ll. 25-28 (assess­ing payment of rent in terms of produce).

115. Brunt 1971,40-43.

116. K. J. Beloch, Die Bevolkerung der griechisch-romischen Welt (Leipzig, 1886), 312-19; see discussion of P. Brunt 1971, 15-25.

117. Mommsen, R.St. 3.190-92; cf. Taylor i960, 15, 16, 74. The curatores were sum­moned with the citizens for the census: Varro, Ling. 6.86.

118. Regular census cycle: Brunt 1971, 15. Census in the first century: T. P. Wise­man, “The census in the first century BC,” JRS 59 (1969): 59-75.

119. I do not discount the role of tradition in the persistence of the five-year cycle, nor the modern observation that, in the first century, regular enumerations fell victim to the size and dispersal of the Roman population.

120. Cycles of twenty years were observed in the standard enumerations of the Ottoman Empire, with shorter periods employed in certain circumstances: M. Kiel, “The Ottoman imperial registers: Central Greece and northern Bulgaria in the I5th-i9th century: The demographic development of two areas compared,” in Bintliff and Sbo- nias, eds., 1999, 195.

121. The first examples of the modern census “in large countries” were conducted in Spain (1787) and the United States (1790): Livi-Bacci 1992, 30. Common wisdom holds that the modern census differs from earlier enumerations because it is used for long­term planning purposes involving an entire population, whereas earlier enumerations counted only restricted groups (e.g., men of a certain age) for specific, immediate pur­poses (taxation, military service). Hence the Roman census, which counted primarily men for the limited purposes of military service, taxation, and political participation, is not comparable to a modern census. It is undeniable, however, that the census of the Roman Republic enabled the Romans to effectively organize their military.

122. In the twentieth century, the United Nations recommends enumerating a pop­ulation every ten years to ensure that demographic data are reliable: United Nations, Statistical Office, Principles and Recommendations for National Population Censuses. Statistical Papers. Series M, No. 27. (New York, 1958).

123. U.S. Constitution, art. 1, sec. 2., para. 3. Census taking in the United States.

124. M. Farrand, ed., The records of the federal convention of 1787 (rev. ed., New Haven, CT, 1966), 1.201,205 (five to seven or ten years), 576 (fifteen years), 589-90, and 596 (ten or twenty years).

125. It is also relevant that the groundwork necessary for a Roman census was largely built into the process. Preparations for the assessment were in the hands of the tribes­men, who traveled to Rome to give the necessary information to the censors, and the tribal supervisors, who traveled to Rome to confirm and supplement the information of their fellow tribesmen. Correcting and updating the lists undoubtedly required effort and time, but this was an administrative chore performed in Rome by the censors' staffs using the records of the censorial archives. The point is that the five-year cycle envis­ages a relatively low level of beforehand preparation as well as a high level of volatil­ity in the assets needed for registration in a Roman property class.

126. Brunt 1971,66, finds confirmation for the date in the increased number of assidui assumed by the enrollment of five or six new legions or “some 27,000 soldiers.” He argues that “some proletarii were now called up.”

127. See the discussion of these reductions in terms of property values and size of landholdings in Rathbone 1993, 121-52, esp. 139-46.

128. K. Hopkins, Conquerors and slaves (Cambridge, 1978), 39 n. 52.

129. Yakobsen 1999, 48-54.

130. Dion. Hal. 4.21.3; see Taylor 1966, 87-90.

131. Taylor i960, 67-68.

132. Taylor 1966, 85-106, is fundamental.

133. This may have been only in consular elections: Develin i978, 377; cf. Yakob- sen i999, 52.

134. Taylor i966, 96-97.

135. For the system of conflating centuries into voting units see the discussion of Taylor i966, 88-90, building on Mommsen.

136. See chapter 3.

137. See comments of T. P. Wiseman, New men in the Roman senate, 139-AD 14 (Oxford, 1971), 130-42; and especially Taylor i960, 297-315.

138. For a similar interpretation, although couched in terms of the debate about dem­ocratic tendencies in the Roman political structure, see A. Yakobsen, “Dionysius of Hali­carnassus on a democratic change in the centuriate assembly,” Scripta Classica Israelica 12 (1993): 139-55; and “Petitio et largitio: Popular participation in the centuriate assem­bly of the late republic,” JRS (1992): 32-52.

139. See chapter 3.

140. RS 1 No. 1, ll. 14, 18.

141. Taylor i960, 21-23.

142. See chapter 7.

143. Lex Plautia: Asc., Corn. 79 C; cf. Ps. Sall., Cic. 2.3.

144. Mommsen, R.St. 3.1.189 with n. 2 for all but lex Aurelia. Lex Aurelia: Asc. 17C; cf. Schol. Bob. 94 St. (cf. Cic., Fam. 8.8.5; Pliny, N.H. 33.31). Centumviri: Brunt 1988, 234-35.

145. Lawmaking in various assemblies: Taylor 1966, 5-6. The conclusions reached in the recent detailed examination of lawmaking in the centuriate assembly by Paana- nen are unconvincing: Paananen 1993, 9-73.

146. E.g., FIRA 1 No. 55, l. 24: honors granted to the naval captain Seleucus by Octavian; FIRA 1 No. 56, ll. 10-11: honors granted to veterans by Octavian. Cf. Tay­lor 1960, 18-22.

147. Some in 268, others by the Italian War; not all Sabines, however, were regis­tered in the same tribes. Citizenship: Taylor i960, 65-66.

148. The overall costs, to be considered in chapters 6 and 7, refute Taylor's suppo­sition that the men who came to Rome to be registered had to be wealthy, mostly men of the first class; she explains in this fashion the slight increase in the census of 86 (463,000) over that of 115 (394,336): Taylor i960, 105.

149. Taylor i960, 159-64.

150. Taylor i960, 101-17.

151. Location of Teretina: Taylor i960, 57-58; enrollment of Aurunci: Taylor i960, 157.

152. Location of Poblilia: Taylor i960, 50-53; enrollment of Hernici: Taylor i960, 157.

153. Tribal enrollments of allies: Taylor i960, 111 ff. (with reference to earlier views of Beloch and Kubitschek, who see the eventual arrangements as penalizing the new citizens).

154. For a list and discussion of “ethnic considerations” in the tribal enrollments of new citizens see Taylor i960, 67 and 157, which notes that the tribes often already existed in the region.

155. Taylor i960, 120 n. 7.

156. Reorganization of local governments and adoption of Roman terminology: U. Laffi, “I senati locali nell'Italia repubblicana,” in Les “bourgeoisies” municipales italiennes aux II et ler siecles av. J.-C. (Paris and Naples, 1983), 70 ff.

157. On this complicated process see Crawford 1996.

158. Cf. Taylor i960, 158.

159. The census enumerations of the period tell the story: from 394,336 in the census of 115 and 463,000 in 86, the Romans expanded to 910,000 in the last census of the “free Republic” in 70 BCE. See chapter 7, note 1.